Game developers are buckling down for a wave of trust and safety changes in 2026.
Safety and privacy were key topics of discussion at GamesBeat Crossfire, our debate-focused event in San Francisco on March 10 during the week of GDC. The event kicked off with a discussion between Entertainment Software Rating Board president Patricia Vance and author, research psychologist and policy development leader Rachel Kowert regarding the role of child safety tools as platforms and game makers step up their safety requirements in 2026.
Moderated by Joe Newman, the senior legal counsel for product and privacy at k-ID, the kick-off session at GamesBeat Crossfire was not a debate, but rather a measured discussion about child safety and the game makers’ exact level of responsibility to ensure a safe environment for all users. One facet of the discussion that came up repeatedly was age verification, with Vance saying that verification initiatives like the one announced by Discord in February are inevitable in the foreseeable future.
“The train has left the station,” Vance said. “It’s just that there are a lot of open questions related to it.”
Kowert, who also moderated a GDC Festival of Gaming panel on the topic of child safety on March 9, pointed out that there are already several companies doing the work to create improved child safety tools and distribute them across the gaming ecosystem — but that the legislators and policy makers who are currently codifying the rules of child safety may not see all of the development happening behind-the-scenes.
“We’ve got to get better at our comms strategy, right? I talk with legislators a lot, and they’re in the 90s version of ‘what content of games doing we need to worry about,’ and I’m like, ‘we don’t have enough time to catch up to where the conversation actually is,’” Kowert said. “So, that is my task, as with everyone here: getting more vocal about what we are doing.”