Australia's eSafety Watchdog Flags Major Child Protection Failures at Steam, Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft

Australia's online safety regulator has delivered a blunt assessment of the gaming industry's efforts to shield young players from harm, concluding that four of the world's most popular gaming platforms have "significant gaps" in their child safety protections.

The eSafety Commissioner's report, released on Friday, examined how Steam, Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft safeguard minors, and found that the four services take markedly different approaches to a problem affecting millions of Australian households. The findings carry particular weight given new research showing that nine out of every ten Australian children between the ages of 8 and 17 have played games online.

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant framed the issue as a matter of basic rights, arguing that children should be able to enjoy online gaming without being subjected to predatory behaviour, sexual extortion, violent extremist material or other harmful content. She warned that lax safeguards on gaming platforms effectively open the door for adults with predatory intentions to contact children, build relationships with them and ultimately groom them for sexual exploitation or radicalisation.

Among the most pointed criticisms in the report was its treatment of Valve, the US gaming giant that operates Steam and its Steam Chat feature. According to the regulator, Valve stood alone among the four providers in failing to deploy a type of technology that has become standard across the industry for identifying and removing harmful content that has already been catalogued. The report also found that Valve did not take a proactive approach to detecting child sexual exploitation material or violent content within its chat systems, noting that its existing mechanisms are geared mainly toward flagging scams.

Roblox drew scrutiny alongside Valve for relying exclusively on internal datasets when training the language detection systems that monitor user interactions, and for failing to retrain those models on a regular basis. The regulator argued that these practices could blunt the effectiveness of automated tools designed to catch dangerous conversations before they escalate.

Fresh concerns were also raised about how the platforms verify the ages of their users. Minecraft and Fortnite, the latter of which does provide dedicated child accounts, generally allow users to declare their own age, the report noted, meaning that anyone willing to claim they are an adult can unlock "higher-risk communication features." Steam was found to follow a similar self-declaration model, though the report acknowledged that the platform has recently begun rolling out age verification through credit card checks. Roblox was credited with having introduced stronger age checks since last December.

The report further highlighted inconsistencies in how the four companies share information and engage with broader industry efforts. Mojang Studios, the developer behind Minecraft, and Roblox were found to contribute industry expertise on combating child sexual exploitation and violent extremism online, while Valve did not. Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, was singled out for failing to report instances of breaches to other platforms participating in a global programme designed to tackle online child sexual exploitation and abuse.

Inman Grant said the regulator expects all of these services to raise their standards, describing the need to identify and counter serious harms — including child sexual exploitation, sexual extortion, and material that promotes, incites or instructs violence — as non-negotiable. Her comments underscore a growing frustration among regulators that gaming platforms, despite their enormous reach among young users, have not matched the safety investments made in other corners of the tech sector.

The findings were compiled from information the eSafety Commission gathered between October 2025 and March 2026 as part of its ongoing examination of how the platforms protect users from serious online harm. The report represents one of the most detailed public audits yet of child safety practices across the gaming industry, a sector that has historically escaped the level of scrutiny applied to social media companies.

Australia has positioned itself at the forefront of global efforts to regulate children's online experiences. Last December, the country introduced a world-leading ban on social media access for under-16s, a policy that notably excluded gaming platforms — a carve-out that critics have argued leaves a significant loophole. More recently, the government has pushed to compel major technology companies to give users the option of opting out of social media algorithms.

The report's release adds pressure on the four companies at a time when policymakers in multiple countries are weighing how to extend child safety rules beyond traditional social networks. The eSafety Commission said it had contacted Valve, Epic Games, Roblox and Microsoft, which owns Minecraft, for comment on the findings.

For Australian families, the report offers a sobering snapshot of an industry whose products are woven into the daily lives of the vast majority of the country's children. While the platforms have introduced some measures — stronger age checks at Roblox, credit-card-based verification at Steam, and child accounts at Fortnite — the regulator's assessment suggests those steps remain uneven and, in some cases, insufficient to address the scale of the risk. Whether the report prompts meaningful changes or simply adds to a growing pile of warnings will depend on how forcefully Australian authorities choose to follow up.