Australia Highlights Serious Child Safety Gaps on Popular Gaming Platforms

In a new eSafety report, Australia’s online‑safety regulator has flagged significant loopholes in how Steam, Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft protect children.

The analysis notes that nine out of ten youngsters in the country play online games, yet safeguards are inconsistent. Valve’s Steam and Roblox were found to use only limited content‑filtering systems, and are missing industry‑standard tools to detect child sexual exploitation or extremist material.

Roblox and Valve also rely on internal data to train language‑detection models and have not regularly updated these systems, increasing the risk that abusive language passes through.

Fortnite and Minecraft allow users to self‑declare their age, meaning adults can access higher‑risk chat features. Steam recently introduced age‑checks via credit card, and Roblox has tightened checks since December, but both still lack robust enforcement.

The report calls on each platform to "lift their game" – identifying and stopping serious harms such as predation, sexual exploitation, extortion and violent extremist content.

While Minecraft and Roblox shared expertise with other industry players, Valve did not. Epic Games, creator of Fortnite, failed to share breaches with a global child‑exploitation prevention programme.

Australia has earlier imposed a social media ban for users under 16 and pushed for algorithm opt‑outs, but these restrictions have not covered gaming platforms.

Valve, Epic Games, Roblox and Microsoft – owners of Minecraft – remains silent on the findings.