They won’t have a Merry Christmas at Epic Games. The company has agreed to accusations from the US Federal Trade Commission (FCT) and a fine of more than half a billion dollars for a free Fortnite Battle Royale event.
Epic Games will pay $275 million fine for violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) because it collected personal information from players under the age of 13 without notifying their parents or obtaining the consent of a guardian.
According to the US Federal Trade Commission By default, Epic has enabled real-time voice and text chat for kids and teens.resulting in several players being bullied, threatened, harassed and asked dangerous and psychologically traumatic questions such as suicide.
He will also have to customer returns $245 million. According to the FCT, the company had to use a number of tricks in Fortnite that forced players unwanted purchases. In addition, Epic had to create a number of barriers to cancel these purchases.
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“An illogical, inconsistent and confusing Fortnite button configuration resulted in players incurring unwanted payments per button press,” FTC said. It is said that players could buy something simply by pressing a button while trying to wake the game while the game was loading, or by pressing the wrong button just trying to view the details of an item.
In addition to paying the fine and refunding the money, Epic must make significant changes to your purchasing systemto prevent such situations in the future, implement a privacy protection program, ensure independent audits and offer refunds to customers who believe they have been improperly charged for in-game items.
One part he has already done. Epic last week he came with a special account for young playerswhich removes public chat and buying items with real currency.
Epic Games has confirmed the acceptance of the agreements on the official website. The company has stated that it wants to be at the forefront of consumer protection and provide players with the best possible experience.
If we look at Fortnite’s total revenue, in 2021 alone it was $5.7 billion.
Source :Indian TV
