![]() "We accepted this agreement because we want Epic to be at the forefront of consumer protection and provide the best experience for our players," Epic said. In a statement Monday, Epic outlined a number of changes it has made to its systems in recent years, but says it is settling the matter with the FTC because it wants to put the issue to bed. The COPPA fine is the largest penalty ever obtained for violating an FTC rule. "Using internal testing, Epic purposefully obscured cancel and refund features to make them more difficult to find." In fact, Epic's changes only made the problem worse," the FTC said. The company "ignored more than one million user complaints and repeated employee concerns that huge numbers of users were being wrongfully charged. ![]() The FTC says Fortnite's "counterintuitive, inconsistent, and confusing button configuration led players to incur unwanted charges based on the press of a single button."īecause of those design tricks, the regulator says it found instances where players were charged while attempting to wake the game from sleep mode, while the game was in a loading screen, or by pressing an adjacent button while attempting simply to preview an item.ĭuration 2:03 Featured VideoEsports and online gaming have flourished during the pandemic as people turn to video games as a source of entertainment and connection. The game, with 400 million players worldwide, is free to download and play but sells things like character costumes and dance moves for money. ![]() The company will also pay $245 million to refund consumers for what they spent on the downloaded content. Epic Games, the maker of the wildly popular video game Fortnite, has agreed to pay $520 million US in fines and rebates for tricking millions of players into making unintentional purchases in the game.Īmerican regulator the Federal Trade Commission said in a release Monday that the company will pay $275 million US for violating a law known as the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by deploying design tricks to get kids to download in-game content that costs real-world money.
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