On 2 October 2026, Australia's eSafety Commissioner published Playing it safe, a transparency report on four of the biggest names in children's gaming: Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite and Steam. It's built from answers those companies were legally required to give.
The short version: some protections are solid, others are thin, and they vary a lot from one game to the next. eSafety found that "significant gaps remain in efforts to prevent and respond to serious harms."
Games sit outside Australia's under-16 social media rules. So this report is one of the clearest looks yet at a place most Aussie kids spend their time, and where the ban doesn't reach.
On 1 April 2026, eSafety sent notices to Roblox, Mojang Studios (Minecraft), Epic Games (Fortnite) and Valve (Steam and Steam Chat). The notices covered how each company protected users between 1 October 2025 and 31 March 2026. eSafety picked these services because they are popular with Australian children.
eSafety notes that several providers have added safety measures since then. Everything below describes the reporting period.
Steam Chat had the fewest protections. Valve was the only provider not using hash-matching, the industry tool that spots known abuse material. It also ran no proactive checks on Steam Chat or Steam Community group chats, apart from a link filter that "mainly blocked scams". In eSafety's words, that left all Steam Chat conversations with "limited protections". Valve had no dedicated trust and safety staff other than content moderators and engineers. It also took part in no industry information-sharing schemes.
Age was often just whatever a child typed in. Minecraft and Fortnite relied on players to self-declare their age when they signed up. Players who said they were 18 or older could reach some higher-risk features without further checks. On Fortnite, that meant chats with other "adult" players that sat outside Epic's default safety tools for private chats involving children. On Minecraft, it meant access to unmoderated servers run by third parties. Steam collected no age information at all during the period.
Roblox changed earlier. From 3 December 2025, Roblox started limiting some high-risk features in Australia to users identified as 18 or older, whatever age they had typed in. eSafety links the change to its own engagement with the company. The report still found weaker spots, including a Roblox image-scanning tool with a recall rate of only 51%. That means it caught about half of the material it was meant to catch.
Some companies were slow, others fast. Epic Games took the longest to assess automated reports of suspected child exploitation material: 18 hours and 53 minutes. Epic also had the highest ratio of trust and safety staff to players, and it reviewed every Fortnite "Island" before it went live.
eSafety's own research found 89% of Australian children aged 8 to 17 had played online games in the past year. It also found that 40% had played online with people they didn't know offline.
The Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, put the risk plainly. Predatory adults "often make first contact with children on games before grooming them for sexual exploitation or for radicalisation."
From 10 December 2025, the law requires age-restricted platforms to stop under-16s holding accounts. That list includes Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube, and more services have self-assessed since. Fortnite and Minecraft have not been assessed by eSafety, which isn't the same as being exempt. You can read more in our guide to which apps are in the ban. For most families, the games stay.
Most of this comes straight from eSafety's own advice for parents.
Keep the door open as well. eSafety's advice is that children should feel they can come to you "without fear of getting in trouble". How we react the first time decides whether they tell us the second time.
A stranger reached one of our sons through a video game he loved and tried to coax him onto a train to 'come stay.' A disturbing clip buried inside a children's cartoon left another of our boys too frightened to sleep with the lights off — years on, he still is. Neither was 'social media,' and both slipped through in an ordinary moment of looking away — because no parent can watch every second, and we don't think we're alone in that.
If your kids game, our guide to what the social media ban doesn't cover is a good next read, and there's more at auntybea.app.
Read next: our guide →
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