Two of Australia’s most popular gaming platforms targeted over risks to children

Failures at two of the world’s most popular gaming platforms have drawn the criticism of Australia’s online safety regulator, who warns that the technology giants risk exposing children to exploitation, abuse and violent extremism materials.

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant has urged gaming providers to strengthen measures to protect children after information shared with the watchdog revealed a raft of shortcomings at some of the industry’s biggest companies.

A new eSafety report, published on Friday, found a lack of methods were in place to detect harmful and illegal material on gaming platforms, including at Valve, provider of the Steam and Steam Chat platforms, and Epic Games, which publishes popular video game Fortnite.

“These platforms have a duty of care to ensure that these are as safe as possible, and they shouldn’t have to farm out the responsibility to the parents to make sure that [children] are not being contacted by predators,” Inman Grant said.

“The burden should not be put on the parents and the children to be policing this or looking after their own safety.”

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.

“What we’ve seen over the last 10 years is firstly a significant amount of online grooming of children through gaming platforms. That includes very child-focused gaming platforms such as Roblox, but there’s also a considerable amount of grooming that takes place through sort of massive online multiplayer games,” Salter said.

“What we see consistently across the gaming ecosystem is that user safety is considered the responsibility of users, and that includes children, and we see gamers really internalise this.”

Valve failed to utilise industry-standard tools to proactively detect harms on the Steam Chat platform, including in group chats, leaving all conversations with limited protections from child sexual exploitation or exposure to violent material, the report found. The only safeguard in place was a URL detection tool used primarily to block scams.

The report, comprising information obtained under compulsory information gathering notices issued by Inman Grant between October 2025 and March 2026, 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, according to the report, 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.

“There’s a hierarchy of harms that these platforms should be paying attention to and certainly those that are deemed illegal in most parts of the world, including child sexual exploitation, grooming, promoting terrorist and violent extremism should be at the top of the list,” Inman Grant said.

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.

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. While Valve had review processes in place to detect unlawful content in games before publication, it relied solely on user reports to identify illegal material in its published games.

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, the report found.

This masthead has previously revealed that Roblox was a hotspot for predators seeking to abuse children. More than 350 million people globally play Roblox each month, most of whom are under 17.

While the providers of Minecraft, Roblox and Fortnite used indicators to detect users who had re-registered or attempted to 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, according to the reports’ findings.

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 of 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.

Left unchecked, gaming platforms could become high-risk environments for child sexual exploitation and abuse and material that promotes or incites crimes or violence, she said.

“It’s sad because the gaming platforms haven’t 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, this nihilistic abuse and radicalisation.”

The typical age of young people being radicalised online was between 14 and 22 years old, Inman Grant said.

Several gaming providers have introduced additional safety measures since receiving the compulsory notices, but Inman Grant urged them to do more.

“We expect these services to lift their game to identify and combat serious harms,” she said.

“Australian children deserve safe online spaces to play, connect and learn.”

Support is available from the National Sexual Assault, Domestic Family Violence Counselling Service at 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732) or the Men’s Referral Service on 1300 766 491.

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