CANBERRA — Australia’s eSafety Commissioner said Friday that Steam, Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft still show “significant gaps” in protecting children online, according to a transparency report based on compulsory notices covering October 2025 to March 2026, the BBC and the regulator reported.
About nine in 10 Australian children aged 8–17 play online games. Valve, which owns Steam and Steam Chat, was the only provider that did not use industry-standard hash-matching to detect known harmful content and did not proactively scan chats beyond a URL tool that mainly blocked scams, eSafety found. Steam relied on self-declared ages during the period and has since begun credit-card age checks; eSafety is pressing for more assurance options. Roblox and Valve trained language detectors only on internal datasets without regular retraining; Roblox’s image tool had about 51 percent recall. Roblox did introduce stronger age assurance from December 2025 after Online Safety Act engagement, limiting some high-risk features to verified adults.
Epic Games (Fortnite) and Mojang (Minecraft) still largely let users self-declare adulthood to unlock higher-risk communication features. Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said improvements followed regulatory pressure, including court-enforceable undertakings accepted from Roblox, but “significant work” remains. Gaming platforms are exempt from Australia’s under-16 social-media ban.
Sources: BBC News, eSafety Commissioner
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