SYDNEY: Australia's online safety regulator said Sunday that popular gaming platforms have "significant gaps" in how they protect children, citing inconsistent safety measures across Steam, Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft.
The eSafety Commission released its report as research shows nine out of 10 Australian children ages 8 to 17 have played online games.
"Australian children have a right to play online without being exposed to predators, sexual extortionists, violent extremist content or other harmful material," eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said.
Inman Grant said weak safety settings allow "predatory adults" to contact children and groom them for sexual exploitation or radicalization.
"We expect these services to lift their game to identify and combat serious harms such as child sexual exploitation, sexual extortion and material and activity which promotes, incites or instructs violence," she said.
The report found that Valve, the U.S. gaming company that owns Steam and Steam Chat, was the only provider that did not use a type of technology widely used in the industry to detect and remove known harmful content. Valve also did not proactively use tools to detect child sexual exploitation or violent material in chats, the report said. Its current systems mainly flag scams.
Valve and Roblox were also cited for using only internal datasets to train language detection systems and for not regularly retraining those models.
Minecraft and Fortnite, which offers child accounts, generally allow users to declare their own age, the report said. That means anyone who says they are an adult can access "higher-risk communication features."
Steam also relies on self-declared ages, but the report acknowledged that the platform recently introduced age checks using credit cards. It said Roblox has had stronger age checks in place since December.
The report also found the four platforms were inconsistent in how they share information 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, the maker of Fortnite, failed to share instances of breaches with other platforms under a global program designed to combat online child sexual exploitation and abuse, the report said.
The findings were based on information the commission collected on how the platforms protected users from serious online harm between October 2025 and March 2026.
Roblox said it "prioritises the safety of our Australian community, especially the youngest users." A spokesperson said the company has "invested heavily" in safeguards for children, including mandatory age checks.
Australia has drawn global attention for its approach to online safety. Last December, it introduced a world-leading social media ban for users under 16, which did not include gaming platforms. It has more recently pushed to require tech companies to let users opt out of social media algorithms.
