More than 600,000 players of Fortnite will start to receive refunds after federal regulators said Epic Games, the developer behind the popular game, “tricked” people into making unwanted purchases.
The Federal Trade Commission announced Monday that it is sending more than $72 million to impacted players in the U.S., with additional refunds to be distributed at a later date. The average payment is about $114 per player, according to the agency.
The news comes two years after the FTC ordered the North Carolina-based Epic Games to pay a total of $520 million to settle allegations that it collected personal data from children without first obtaining the consent of a parent or guardian.
As part of the settlement, Epic neither confirmed nor denied the allegations, though at the time it agreed to overhaul its privacy policies and chat and text functions, as well as reconfigure how it charges game users.
A spokesperson for the developer did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
“The FTC alleged that Fortnite’s counterintuitive, inconsistent, and confusing button configuration led players of all ages to incur unwanted charges based on the press of a single button,” the agency said in its release Monday. “For example, players could be 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.”
Fortnite, a battle royale game that launched in 2017, allows players to play on a team or solo as they try to pick one another off until they’re the last team or player standing. Epic Games does not publicly share player statistics. But Active Player, a game statistics website, estimates that there are currently 30 million active players a day.
The FTC said that eligible consumers can still submit a claim online; the deadline is Jan. 10.
