Epic To Pay Over Half a Billion Dollars to Settle FTC Charges

Fortnite maker Epic Games has agreed to pay over $500 million to settle charges from the US Federal Trade Commission.

According to the FTC, the company is required to pay for two consumer protection issues – $275 million for the privacy violations and $245 million for user-interface design choices which make it easy for consumers to purchase items accidentally and very difficult for them to cancel or refund those purchases.

The privacy violations included collecting personal information from children under the age of 13 without first receiving their parents’ verifiable consent.

Apart from accusing Epic of illegal collection of children’s data, the FTC claimed that the game's settings enabled voice and text chat for children and teens by default which exposed kids to bullying and harassment and required Epic to adopt strong privacy settings that will make voice and text communications turned off by default.

As for the user-interface complaint, the FTC noted that Epic used "dark patterns" that duped "millions of players into making unintentional purchases."

According to the regulator, "Fortnite’s counterintuitive, inconsistent, and confusing button configuration led players to incur unwanted charges based on the press of a single button" which meant that users could accidentally purchase something when trying to wake the game from sleep mode or when pressing an adjacent button while trying to just preview an item.

Epic confirmed the settlement and said it would be "moving beyond long-standing industry practices."

"No developer creates a game with the intention of ending up here. The video game industry is a place of fast-moving innovation, where player expectations are high and new ideas are paramount," the company wrote in a blog post. "We accepted this agreement because we want Epic to be at the forefront of consumer protection and provide the best experience for our players."

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