In brief
A new report by Australia’s eSafety Commissioner shows that nine in ten children aged 8‑17 play online games but current safety tools are uneven and often ineffective. Steam and Roblox fail to use standard content‑removal technology, and all four platforms allow adults to mis‑declare their age for high‑risk chat. The regulator calls on Valve, Epic Games, Roblox and Microsoft to improve detection, age checks and data sharing to protect children from exploitative and extremist content.
Australia says major gaming platforms have significant child‑safety gaps. The eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, released a report that found inconsistent and often weak protection on Steam, Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft.
Ninety percent of Australian children aged 8‑17 have played online games, yet the report details how Valve, the owner of Steam, is the only platform that does not use industry‑standard machine‑learning tools to detect and remove child‑sexual‑exploitation content. Roblox and Valve both rely solely on internal data sets for language‑filter models and have not consistently retrained those models.
Minecraft and Fortnite allow child accounts but depend on users to self‑declare age, meaning adults can access higher‑risk chat features. Steam has recently introduced age checks using credit cards, while Roblox has tightened its checks since December.
The regulator cited inconsistent sharing of safety data and participation in global initiatives. Mojang and Roblox collaborate on combating child‑sexual‑exploitation and violent extremism, but Valve does not, and the Epic Games team failed to report breaches to a global programme designed to fight online child exploitation.
These findings follow Australia’s earlier ban on social media for users under 16 (which excluded gaming services) and its push to let users opt out of algorithmic curation.
Valve, Epic Games, Roblox and Microsoft have been contacted for comment.
