Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony Collaborate to Improve Player Safety - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 14 January 2026 / 2,523 Views
Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony Interactive Entertainment have announced a collaboration to improve player safety across Xbox, Switch, and PlayStation platforms.
The three companies have been working together behind-the-scenes as they believe "believe gaming is for everyone" and are "pursuing a multidisciplinary approach, integrating advanced technology, research-driven insights, supportive community efforts, and skilled human oversight."
Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony Interactive Entertainment are working together "to invest in, adapt, and amplify" their approaches to player safety. They have also evolved their "shared principles to ensure they represent our constant efforts to keep our communities safe."
Read details on the shared principles across Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony Interactive Entertainment below:
Prevention: Empower players and parents to understand and control gaming experiences
- We provide controls that let players customize their gaming experience. We support parents with the tools and information necessary to help them customize appropriate gaming experiences for their children.
- We recognize that for safety features to be useful, they must be easy to use and understand. We promote the availability of our safety tools and provide guidance on how to use them through our platforms, support channels, services, on our websites, and in retail stores to reach more players and parents.
- We inform our parents and players about our codes of conduct and terms of use to support positive gaming experiences for everyone. We enforce these policies through a variety of preventive and remedial measures. We design our products with transparency and player empowerment at their core, aiming to make experiences that are intuitive and respect players’ choices.
Partnership: We partner with industry peers, publishers, regulators, law enforcement, and our communities to advance player safety
- Our commitment to safety is central, and we believe collaboration benefits the video game industry and all players by fostering safe gaming experiences.
- We partner and engage with global and regional industry trade organizations, industry members, regulators, law enforcement, non-profit organizations, and experts to develop and/or advance online safety initiatives. These include Thriving in Games Group, the Family Online Safety Institute, and others.
- We conduct shared research to inform policy decisions and to drive industry innovation. Individually, we have engaged with external research centers that study play and wellbeing.
- We partner with our community to promote safe gaming behavior and encourage the use of reporting tools to call out bad actors, and we have tools and processes in place to support rapid response to emerging incidents.
- We collaborate with ratings agencies such as the ESRB and PEGI, among others, to ensure that our games are rated for the appropriate audience, and work closely with the Entertainment Software Association and other trade associations to share trust & safety information designed to educate and promote positive play experiences.
- We invest in leading technology and proactive collaboration to help thwart improper conduct and content. We participate in key industry initiatives, including the Tech Coalition and its Lantern program, that are dedicated to enhancing child safety through technology, knowledge-sharing, and transparency.
Responsibility: We hold ourselves accountable for making our platforms as safe as possible for all players
- We make it easy for players to report violations of our codes of conduct and community guidelines, which we work to refine and evolve to support our player communities.
- In addition to removing content not suitable for our services, we take appropriate enforcement actions for violations, including restricting players from using our services for misconduct, with escalating restrictions for egregious or repeat violations. We engage in responsible and transparent practices, including the ethical use of all data, and deploy process enhancement technologies with skilled human oversight.
- We comply with all applicable laws in the places we do business and respond to legitimate requests from law enforcement. We promptly notify law enforcement if we observe unlawful conduct or where we believe a player is at risk of imminent harm.
- We publish our rules and requirements, and we ensure that players who have been reported understand the requirements for continued engagement with our platforms.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
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Sounds like a long-winded way of telling the average gamer to be prepared for further inconveniences online, because the negligent parents who already don't pay attention to what their kids are up to certainly aren't going to suddenly change their tune after whatever this is.
Why are most parents too stupid to be parents? -_-
i was in California a couple months ago and its not just the parents, its the parents of the parents
I am trying to make sense of what you're saying here. This collaboration is mostly about online safety while using their products, aka games, so like, if Bob and Mark play a game online, and Bob calls Mark a slur, is it Mark's parents fault that Mark got called a slur? Were they negligent for letting Mark play games online? Are you suggesting that the people who gets harassed should be punished instead of the people doing the harassment? I am really confused here.
This is just about banning more people that shout and rage at other online? Or name call people. With them shareing between one another, does this mean if a person get a temp ban on say Xbox, for name calling someone something ugly..... maybe Nintendo are like "your also banned here for x time periode" ?
Good idea. The safer people feel about video games and their kids being online the more likely they are to let them play games.
So what's the real story here? I'm not naive enough to believe that any corporation would voluntarily allocate resources to something like this out of the kindness of their hearts. Either some new legislation has caught up with them, forcing them to do this, or this is a new path towards player control and profits somehow.
Blackrock sending down the commands. Not solving issues like roblox predators
