Australia finds child safety gaps in the games children actually use

Australia has taken another look at the digital playground and, unsurprisingly, found that it is not quite as tidy as the industry would like to claim. The country’s eSafety Commission says Steam, Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft still have significant gaps in how they protect children online, even though nine in 10 Australian children aged 8 to 17 have played online games.

Julie Inman Grant, the eSafety Commissioner, said Australian children have a right to play online without being exposed to predators, sexual extortionists, violent extremist content or other harmful material. That is a fairly modest expectation, and yet the report suggests several of the biggest platforms still struggle to meet it consistently.

Valve, which owns Steam and Steam Chat, drew the sharpest criticism. The report says it was the only provider that did not use a type of technology widely used across the industry to detect and remove known harmful content. It also did not proactively use tools to detect child sexual exploitation or violent material in chats, relying instead on systems that mainly flagged scams.

Roblox was also singled out, along with Valve, for using only internal datasets to train language detection systems and for not regularly retraining those models. A Roblox spokesperson said the company prioritises the safety of its Australian community, especially the youngest users, and said it had invested heavily in safeguards, including mandatory age checks.

Age checks were another weak point. Minecraft and Fortnite, which does offer child accounts, generally let users self-declare their age, meaning anyone who said they were an adult could access higher-risk communication features. Steam also relied on self-declared ages, although the report noted that it has recently introduced age checks using credit cards. Roblox has also strengthened its age checks since last December.

The report also criticised the way the four companies share information with one another and take part in industry initiatives. Mojang Studios, the developer of Minecraft, and Roblox shared expertise on combating child sexual exploitation and violent extremism online, but Valve did not. Epic Games, which makes Fortnite, failed to share breach incidents with other platforms under a global programme designed to combat online child sexual exploitation and abuse.

The findings are based on information collected by Australia’s eSafety Commission between October 2025 and March 2026. They land in a country that has already made itself a reference point for online regulation, after introducing a social media ban for under-16s last December. That measure did not include gaming platforms, which now find themselves under their own, belated spotlight.

For the industry, the message is plain enough. Popularity is no substitute for basic safeguards, and self-declaration is a thin defence when children are the ones at risk. The report does not ask these companies to become saints; it asks them to do the job they already claim to be doing.

Written by Andreas Hofer andreas.hofer@alpineweekly.com