ع
Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has called on the operators of major online gaming services to substantially strengthen their child safety systems after a new transparency report laid bare inconsistent and often insufficient protections against serious harms. The assessment, which drew on compulsory information provided by the companies for the period between October 2025 and March 2026, highlighted how predatory adults exploit weak safeguards to groom children or expose them to violent extremist material. According to the regulator, Australian children have a right to play online without being exposed to predators, sexual extortionists, violent extremist content or other harmful material.
The eSafety transparency report placed particular emphasis on shortcomings at Valve, the company behind Steam and Steam Chat, which stood out for its limited use of industry-standard tools. Valve was the only provider among those reviewed that did not deploy hash-matching technology to detect and remove known child sexual abuse material across its services. Unlike competitors, the company also refrained from proactive detection of harms in text or voice chats outside a basic URL filter that mainly targeted scams, leaving those spaces with minimal defenses against exploitation or violence.
Roblox came in for criticism over the performance of its Image Auto-mod tool, which achieved a recall rate of just 51 percent for detecting violence and child sexual exploitation material in images. Both Roblox and Valve relied solely on internal data sources to train their language analysis models and failed to update them regularly, a contrast to Epic Games’ approach on Fortnite that incorporated external keyword lists and synthetic data. While Roblox has since December 2025 introduced more robust age assurance that restricts high-risk features for users identified as under 18, the report indicated that broader gaps in enforcement and response times persist.
Age verification practices across the reviewed platforms largely depended on self-declaration during the reporting window, enabling adults to access features intended for children by simply stating an older age. Minecraft and Fortnite offered some child-specific accounts yet still permitted self-reporting that undermined those controls, while Steam has only recently begun limited credit-card checks. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that experts have linked these weaknesses to repeated incidents of grooming on the services, underscoring the need for stronger verification methods that eSafety continues to negotiate with the companies.
Around nine in 10 Australian children aged eight to 17 play online games, according to eSafety research, a level of engagement that predatory actors deliberately target for initial contact before moving victims to less monitored channels. A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis of global data estimated that 8.1 percent of children under 18 experience some form of online child sexual exploitation and abuse in a given year, with solicitation and non-consensual image sharing among the most common forms. These figures illustrate why the Australian regulator has pursued legally binding undertakings, including one secured from Roblox in August 2026 to prevent adult-child contact without consent and to improve detection of grooming behaviours.
Earlier this year eSafety issued transparency notices to the four providers after media reports documented terrorist-themed games on Roblox, far-right imagery in Minecraft creations and extreme-right communities on Steam. Mojang Studios and Roblox have participated in cross-industry efforts to share signals on child exploitation, yet Valve declined to join such initiatives and Epic Games did not share certain data through a global programme aimed at combating the problem. The commissioner has indicated that further enforcement measures, including civil penalties, could follow if the platforms do not rapidly close the identified deficiencies.
