Australia Finds Significant Child-Safety Gaps Across Gaming Platforms

What changed

Australia’s eSafety Commission has found “significant gaps” in child-safety systems across Steam, Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft, based on information gathered between October 2025 and March 2026.

The clearest fault line is Valve’s Steam and Steam Chat: it was the only named provider not using widely adopted technology to detect and remove known harmful content. Its systems mainly flagged scams, rather than proactively identifying child sexual exploitation or violent material in chats.

Why it matters

Online games are not a side room of the internet. Nine out of 10 Australian children aged 8 to 17 have played them, and weak safeguards can give predatory adults a route to contact children before grooming, sexual exploitation or radicalisation.

The platforms also handle age differently. Minecraft and Fortnite generally let users declare their own age, which can open higher-risk communication features to anyone claiming to be an adult. Steam also relies on self-declaration, although it has recently added credit-card age checks. Roblox introduced stronger age checks last December.

The regulator’s criticism is therefore about more than one missing filter. It is about a patchwork system: some platforms check age, some do not; some share expertise and breach information, while others remain outside those efforts. Mojang Studios and Roblox shared expertise on combating child sexual exploitation and violent extremism. Valve did not, while Fortnite maker Epic Games failed to share breaches through a global programme intended to combat online child sexual exploitation and abuse.

Australia’s under-16 social-media ban, introduced last December, excludes gaming platforms. That leaves games in a particularly awkward position: widely used by children, but governed by a different safety boundary.

The report does not show how often harmful incidents occurred or whether the companies will change their systems. The next meaningful test is whether platforms move from reacting to reported abuse toward consistently preventing risky contact in the first place.