Australia has raised concerns about security flaws in popular video games that may expose children to online predators. According to the Australian Commission for Online Safety, platforms such as Steam, Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft have "significant" shortcomings in their safety measures. The report, compiled between October 2025 and March 2026, highlights that nine out of ten Australian children aged 8 to 17 have played online games, often using them as a space for social interaction. Julie Inman Grant, Australia's online safety commissioner, emphasized that children have the right to play online without being exposed to predators, sexual extortion, violent extremist content, or other harmful content. The report notes that while platforms have tools to detect certain behaviors, these tools do not necessarily cover all forms of harmful content. Valve, owner of Steam and Steam Chat, is the only one of the four studied platforms not to use a widely adopted technology in the sector to identify and remove known harmful content. According to the report, Valve also does not proactively use tools designed to detect content related to child sexual exploitation or violence in conversations. Its current systems mainly focus on fraud. Roblox and Valve use their own databases to train their language detection systems but do not regularly retrain these models. The report points out that this approach leaves a blind spot in private conversations, where malicious adults can gain the trust of children. Minecraft and Fortnite also have weaknesses identified by the report. Both services offer child accounts but generally rely on a simple age declaration by the user, allowing a player to declare themselves as an adult and access "higher-risk communication features." This mechanism reduces the effectiveness of certain protections for younger users. Steam also relies on self-declaration of age, although Valve has recently begun to introduce controls using bank cards to verify the age of certain users. Roblox has strengthened its controls since December last year, but these measures remain insufficient in the eyes of the regulator. Julie Inman Grant stated that these companies must improve their ability to detect "child sexual exploitation, sexual extortion, and content and activities that encourage, incite, or teach violence." Another weakness identified by Australia is the lack of collaboration between platforms. Mojang Studios, the developer of Minecraft, and Roblox have participated in sharing expertise in the sector around the fight against child sexual exploitation and online violent extremism. Valve did not do so, while Epic Games, which publishes Fortnite, did not share certain data breach cases within a global program aimed at combating online child exploitation and abuse. Australia has positioned itself as a laboratory for regulating the digital use of minors, having banned access to social media for those under 16, a measure not applied to video game platforms. The country is also working to allow users to opt out of social media recommendation algorithms. Video games remain in a different space, but the report reminds that for children, playing online no longer simply means playing. It also involves chatting, meeting strangers, joining communities, and sometimes being exposed to content or behaviors to which the protection mechanisms have not yet fully learned to respond. In this universe, the boundary between playground and hunting ground can sometimes be particularly thin.