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Australia's eSafety Commissioner has urged gaming platforms to strengthen child protection measures after a report found failures at Valve, Epic Games and other major providers. The report revealed weak age verification, poor detection of harmful content and limited information sharing.
A new eSafety report has criticised two of the world's most popular gaming platforms, warning that failures at Valve and Epic Games risk exposing children to exploitation, abuse and violent extremism material.
Gaming Platforms Face Child Safety Concerns
Australia's eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant urged gaming providers to strengthen measures to protect children after information shared with the watchdog revealed shortcomings at some of the industry's biggest companies. The report, published on Friday, found a lack of methods were in place to detect harmful and illegal material on gaming platforms. It examined Valve, provider of Steam and Steam Chat, and Epic Games, which publishes the popular video game Fortnite.
The findings were based on information obtained under compulsory information gathering notices issued by Inman Grant between October 2025 and March 2026. The report highlighted stark differences in steps taken by gaming companies to protect children from harm, including information sharing and collaboration across the industry. Valve did not participate in any information sharing initiatives, while Epic Games did not share signals of breaches related to child sexual exploitation and abuse with other service providers.
Neither company participated in the Tech Coalition's Lantern initiative, a global cross-platform information-sharing program launched in 2023 to combat online child sexual exploitation and abuse. Valve failed to utilise industry-standard tools to proactively detect harms on Steam Chat, including in group chats, leaving all conversations with limited protections from child sexual exploitation or exposure to violent material. The only safeguard in place was a URL detection tool used primarily to block scams.
While Valve had review processes to detect unlawful content in games before publication, it relied solely on user reports to identify illegal material in its published games. Several major gaming services, including Minecraft and Fortnite, relied on users self-declaring their age when creating accounts, the report found. In some cases, users who declared themselves adults were able to access higher-risk communication features without undergoing additional age checks.
Age Verification and Child Protection Gaps
Minecraft players who self-declared as 18 or older could access and play on servers, or worlds, hosted by third parties and not proactively monitored by Mojang Studios, the game's developer. Steam and Steam Chat also relied on users self-declaring their age and did not collect information to verify whether users were adults or children. Inman Grant is seeking an undertaking from Steam, which conducted age checks only through credit cards, to increase age verification methods available to users.
Valve and Roblox, played by most Australian children aged between six and 13 years, reported using only internal data to train language detection systems used to prevent exposure to harmful content and did not regularly retrain the technology. More than 350 million people globally play Roblox each month, most of whom are under 17. A previous investigation revealed that Roblox was a hotspot for predators seeking to abuse children.
While the providers of Minecraft, Roblox and Fortnite used indicators to detect users who had re-registered with new details after being banned for offences related to child sexual exploitation and abuse or violent material, Valve employed minimal methods to detect such users. Mojang Studios on average had longer median response times to user reports of unlawful and harmful content on Minecraft than other providers. Epic Games took almost 19 hours to respond to automated reports of child exploitation and abuse.
The fewer indicators used, the more likely perpetrators were to return to platforms and continue committing child sexual exploitation, abuse and sexual extortion, Inman Grant said. Inman Grant said the platforms have a duty of care to ensure they are as safe as possible. She said they should not farm out the responsibility to parents to make sure children are not being contacted by predators.
Platforms' Duty of Care
The burden should not be put on parents and children to police this or look after their own safety, she said. Professor Michael Salter, a child exploitation expert at the University of NSW, said Valve and Epic Games' platforms had been linked to nihilistic and sadistic groups targeting children online. He said the last 10 years had seen a significant amount of online grooming of children through gaming platforms, including child-focused platforms such as Roblox and massive online multiplayer games.
Salter said user safety is consistently considered the responsibility of users across the gaming ecosystem, including children, and gamers internalise this. Inman Grant said there is a hierarchy of harms that platforms should pay attention to. She said those deemed illegal in most parts of the world, including child sexual exploitation, grooming, and promoting terrorist and violent extremism, should be at the top of the list.
Left unchecked, gaming platforms could become high-risk environments for child sexual exploitation and abuse and material that promotes or incites crimes or violence, Inman Grant said. She said it is sad because the gaming platforms have not been tightened up to the extent that they could. She said children are being exposed to or having to stave off predatory adults that could be trying to groom them into contact offending, sexual exploitation, nihilistic abuse and radicalisation.
Online Radicalisation Risks for Young People
The typical age of young people being radicalised online is between 14 and 22 years old, Inman Grant said.
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brisbanetimes:This story was compiled and edited by the HeadTopics newsroom and HT AI from the reports above.
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