eSafety is calling on the world’s largest online game service providers to strengthen protections against child sexual exploitation and violent extremist content and activity that can contribute to radicalisation.
The call to action comes as eSafety releases a new transparency report, which reveals significant differences in the child safety measures taken by the service providers behind Roblox, Fortnite, Minecraft and Steam.
Published today, Playing it safe: how online game services are (or are not) keeping kids safe online examines information provided to eSafety under compulsory notices issued to the providers of Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite and Steam. The notices required providers to explain how they protected users from serious online harms between 1 October 2025 and 31 March 2026.
While several providers have introduced additional safety uplifts since receiving the notices, the report found significant gaps remain in efforts to prevent and respond to serious harms.
The findings included inconsistent approaches to preventing high-risk games from being accessible on their services.
Left unchecked or unmoderated, these games can contain unlawful material or create environments for child sexual exploitation and abuse or activity which promotes, incites or instructs in matters of crime or violence.
“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.
"Service providers should leverage systems that actually detect and disrupt serious harms before children are exposed to them.
“While we have seen some safety improvements as a result of sustained regulatory pressure, including the recent court-enforceable undertakings we accepted from Roblox, there is still significant work to be done across the board to prevent serious harms in online gaming to children.”
The report found that while most game service providers used tools to proactively detect unlawful and harmful material, the quality and coverage of these tools differed across each service.
For instance, Valve, the provider of Steam and Steam Chat, was the only provider that did not use hash-matching technology across its services, despite the technology being widely used across the industry to detect and remove known harmful content.
Unlike the other providers, Valve failed to use tools to proactively detect harms on Steam Chat, including Steam Community group chats, outside of a URL detection tool that ‘mainly blocked scams’. This left all chats on Steam Chat with limited protections from child sexual exploitation or violence material.
Roblox and Valve reported using only internal datasets to train language detection systems, with neither provider regularly retraining those models.
“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,” Ms Inman-Grant said.
“Our own research into children and gaming showed around 9 in 10 children aged 8 to 17 in Australia had played online games.
“Predatory adults know this and often make first contact with children on games before grooming them for sexual exploitation or for radicalisation” Ms Inman Grant said.
“With so many Australian kids enjoying gaming, it is critical game service providers adopt meaningful and continuing Safety by Design measures to protect their young players.”
The findings also show significant differences in industry collaboration and information sharing, including the extent to which they participate in well-established initiatives to counter terrorism and child sexual abuse.
Mojang Studios, the provider of Minecraft, and Roblox participated in various cross-industry information-sharing initiatives designed to combat child sexual exploitation and abuse and violent extremism online.
Valve did not participate in any such initiatives, while Epic Games, the provider of Fortnite, did not share child sexual exploitation and abuse signals through the Technology Coalition’s Lantern program.
"Gaming service providers should be actively sharing intelligence about serious harms occurring across the gaming ecosystem, particularly where safety risks can follow online gamers who use gaming-adjacent services to chat with friends, join communities, share content, or co-ordinate gameplay,” Ms Inman Grant said.
The report found several major gaming services still relied primarily on users self-declaring their age when creating accounts.
Minecraft and Fortnite offered protections for child accounts but generally relied on self-declared age information. In some cases, users who stated they were adults could access higher-risk communication features without additional age checks.
Steam and Steam Chat also relied on self-declared ages during the reporting period and did not collect information to verify whether users were children or adults. Steam is now conducting age checks through credit cards only and eSafety is engaging with the company to seek commitments that it will put in place additional forms of age assurance to give its customers choice.
By contrast, Roblox introduced stronger age assurance measures in December 2025, restricting access to some higher-risk features unless users were verified as adults. The changes followed extensive engagement with eSafety under Australia's Online Safety Act.
"We expect providers to adopt proven safeguards, share intelligence on emerging threats and build safety into their services from the outset. This includes incorporating effective age assurance and knowing which adults on these co-mingled gaming platforms are parents or predators,” Ms Inman Grant said.
“In the meantime, eSafety will continue our work to push industry to ensure their services are safer for children and young people.
"Australian children deserve safe online spaces to play, connect and learn," Ms Inman Grant said.
"Parents can also play an important role by continuing to engage with their kids about their online play. eSafety's Gaming Guide for Parents is an excellent resource to help get these important conversations flowing.”
Background: The transparency report was published under Australia's Basic Online Safety Expectations framework, which allows eSafety to compel online services to explain how they are protecting Australian users from serious harms.