Online gaming has become a place where children meet strangers, spend money and build reputations, often with no reliable way to tell who is on the other side of the screen. That gap is why a trust and safety layer, covering identity, age assurance, moderation and community safety, is moving from an optional feature to a baseline expectation. The scale of the harm explains the urgency.

How big are the online harms young gamers face?

Bullying followed children onto the platforms where they play. A 2024 WHO/Europe study found that 15% of adolescents, around one in six, had experienced cyberbullying, based on data from more than 279,000 young people aged 11, 13 and 15 across 44 countries and regions in the 2021/2022 survey.

Games themselves are a hotspot. In the United States, the Anti-Defamation League reported that 76% of adult gamers experienced harassment in online multiplayer games in 2023, and that identity-based harassment of players aged 10 to 17 rose to 37% from 29% the year before.

How are children targeted for money in games?

The social features that make games fun also carry financial risk. A 2025 survey commissioned by Vodafone found that 839,127 British children aged 11 to 16 had been scammed online in the previous 12 months, with 22% of those scams occurring on gaming platforms. Free items, discounted currency and fake giveaways are common lures, and they reach children through the same chat and friend systems they use to play.

Why do identity and age assurance matter?

These numbers share a root cause. When accounts are anonymous and ages are self-declared, a platform cannot easily separate a 13 year-old from an adult posing as one, or a first-time visitor from a banned account returning under a new name. Age assurance and lightweight identity signals do not read minds, but they raise the cost of impersonation and let a service apply age-appropriate settings by default rather than hoping a child ticks the right box. The aim is safe access and age-appropriate participation, not exclusion.

What does a trust and safety layer actually involve?

A trust and safety layer bundles several functions that used to be handled ad hoc: confirming an age band, giving players a persistent identity and reputation, moderating chat and voice, and routing reports to someone who can act. A small but growing set of companies is building these as shared infrastructure rather than leaving every studio to reinvent them. In Estonia, Passport.GG describes itself as “the identity layer for trusted esports communities,” offering verified player and team identity and a persistent participation history, and Valvur, which calls itself “the operating system for digital trust,” describes a trust and safety infrastructure for gaming communities spanning identity verification, moderation, community trust and compliance. These are descriptions of what such tools set out to do. No product on its own solves safeguarding, which still depends on human judgement, clear policy and enforcement.

Is regulation catching up?

Governments have stopped treating age as a self-declared detail. In July 2025 the European Commission made available an age-verification blueprint designed to let users prove they meet an age threshold without disclosing who they are, supporting the child-protection duties in Article 28 of the Digital Services Act. In Australia, age-restricted platforms must take reasonable steps to stop under-16s from creating or keeping accounts from 10 December 2025. Games, tournament platforms and community spaces sit inside the same shift, because an organiser onboarding minors is answering the same question a social network faces at sign-up.

Can we protect players without watching them?

The balance to hold is safe access, not mass surveillance. The stronger designs prove an age band or a trusted identity once, then let individual games read a signal instead of harvesting fresh documents and behavioural data at every turn. That keeps data collection proportionate to the risk and avoids turning youth safety into blanket monitoring. The evidence shows the problem is real and measurable. The work now is to meet it with the lightest tools that do the job, protect the data they touch, and explain the whole thing to the young players and parents who have to trust it.

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