Australia Calls Out Steam, Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft Over Child Safety Failures

Key points

• Australia's eSafety Commission found "significant gaps" in child protection across Steam, Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft in a report covering October 2025 to March 2026.
• Valve, the company behind Steam, was the only platform among the four that did not use industry-standard technology to detect and remove known child sexual abuse material.
• Steam and Roblox both train their content-detection systems on internal data only, without drawing on shared industry datasets, and neither retrains those systems regularly.
• Fortnite maker Epic Games failed to share reports of abuse with other platforms under a global cross-industry programme designed to fight child sexual exploitation.
• Mojang Studios and Roblox did share expertise on combating child sexual exploitation and violent extremism; Valve did not.

Nine out of ten children aged 8 to 17 in Australia play online games. That statistic sits at the centre of a hard-hitting new report from the country's eSafety Commission, which examined whether Steam, Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft were doing enough to keep young players safe. The short answer: no.

What did the report actually find?

The four platforms take inconsistent, and in some cases dangerously inadequate, approaches to detecting grooming, sexual extortion and violent extremist content.

Valve's Steam came off worst. It was the only platform that didn't use PhotoDNA or an equivalent hash-matching tool, a technology that compares uploaded images against a database of known illegal content and removes matches automatically. Steam's chat-monitoring systems focus mainly on catching scams rather than detecting child sexual exploitation or violent material. Roblox and Valve also drew only on their own private datasets when training the AI-based language filters that scan conversations for harmful text, and neither refreshed those models regularly, meaning new grooming tactics could slip through undetected.

Age verification was a weak point across the board. Minecraft and Fortnite largely let users type in a birthdate with no further check, so an adult claiming to be a child faced no real barrier. Steam did the same, though the report acknowledged the platform had recently started using credit-card checks as a limited form of age verification. Roblox tightened its age checks in December 2024, a move that followed the legal agreement it signed with Australian regulators that we reported on 22 August, after the watchdog found adult accounts could contact children without a parent ever knowing.

Epic Games was separately criticised for not sharing abuse incidents with other companies through a global cross-industry programme designed to help platforms warn each other about bad actors. Mojang and Roblox did participate in that kind of knowledge-sharing; Valve did not.

What are the platforms saying?

Roblox said it "prioritises the safety of our Australian community, especially the youngest users" and has "invested heavily" in safeguards including mandatory age checks. Valve, Epic Games and Microsoft, which owns Minecraft developer Mojang Studios, hadn't responded to the BBC News report at time of publication.

ESafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant was direct: "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."

Australia has been pushing harder on platform accountability than most countries. It introduced a social media ban for under-16s in December 2024, though that law didn't cover gaming platforms.

What should parents do right now?

Check whether your child's account on any of these platforms has an age set accurately, and turn on any available parental controls. Roblox has a dedicated parental controls dashboard that restricts who can contact your child. Fortnite's "Cabined Accounts" limit communication features for younger players. Steam has no dedicated child account system at all, which is worth knowing before a younger child uses it unsupervised.

Common questions

Is my child's gaming account at immediate risk?

The report describes structural weaknesses in how platforms detect harmful contact, not a specific breach of account data. Risk here means exposure to harmful adults through in-game chat, not stolen passwords or financial information.

Did Australia's report result in any fines or legal orders?

The eSafety Commission published findings and expectations, but didn't announce fines or enforcement orders. It has separate powers under Australian law to issue formal notices, and this report reads as a step toward using them.

Does this affect children outside Australia?

The report covers Australian users and Australian law, but the platform weaknesses it identifies aren't region-specific. The same gaps apply wherever these services run with the same settings.