Fortnite Fined $520M for Invading Kids’ Privacy and Tricking Players

https://kotaku.com/fortnite-epic-games-ftc-fine-privacy-refunds-skins-1849910311

by Aissen • 4 years ago

44 8 4 years ago

This game is all about financial exploitation; spend real money on nothing. The great irony is they don’t want to follow AppStore rules and take an even bigger cut.

autoexec2• 4 years ago

Apple's 30 percent fee is financial exploitation too, no shock that they'd want to avoid paying it, but at least apple is upfront with people about how they're screwing them and unlike Fortnite they aren't targeting children.

lwansbrough• 4 years ago

How are they up front? Most people don't know Apple is taking a 30% cut and therefore are often asked to pay more by the app developer.

thunky• 4 years ago

This game is all about financial exploitation

Fortnite is 100% free to play.

What's the exploitation?

otachack• 4 years ago

The article goes over what Epic is looking to change in response to the FTC.

- Automatically saving payment data - Single-button press purchases - Disabling accounts that seek refunds for fraudulent purchases - Lack of self-service refunds - No spending limits for players under 13

All these can be considered exploitive.

Yhippa• 4 years ago

And sure enough, Epic Games wrote in a blog post today that it believes this is an inflection point for evolving regulatory standards around online gaming. “The old status quo for in-game commerce and privacy has changed, and many developer practices should be reconsidered,” the company wrote. “We share the underlying principles of fairness, transparency and privacy that the FTC enforces, and the practices referenced in the FTC’s complaints are not how Fortnite operates.”

Sounds like Epic Games is about to try out regulatory capture.

dbttdft• 4 years ago

You can get fined for having mic on now? I know games that have bugs where open mic will turn on without you enabling it from time to time. This will never change, as the current way people program is just gluing poorly made libraries with not even applicable protocols like XMPP into their games and software. This reminds me of how in Fortnite you could not talk during the loading screen because they used a framework (UE4) that has some specific flows where you're meant to have a distinct loading screen and they didn't intend for players to maintain a party outside a session on a server. This could all be avoided with real programming but nobody does real programming anymore. It's amazing how games can have any legal implications at all, being things that matter the very least in society. All those redditor morons obsessed with civics who buy a game to put on their shelf are responsible for this.

Fortnite Fined $520M for Invading Kids’ Privacy and Tricking Players

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