The $520 Million Button: How the FTC Made Epic Pay for Fortnite's Design
One fine for children's privacy, one refund fund for purchases players never meant to make. The Fortnite settlement changed how US regulators look at game design, and the refunds are still a lesson for every studio.
In Fortnite's item shop, a single button press could buy something. That sounds like a feature. To the US Federal Trade Commission, it was part of a pattern that tricked players, many of them children, into spending money they did not mean to spend.
In December 2022, Epic Games agreed to pay a total of $520 million to settle two FTC cases over Fortnite. It was one of the largest penalties ever imposed on a games company, and it changed how regulators around the world talk about game design.
Two cases, two problems
The settlement had two parts.
The first was about children's privacy. The FTC said Epic broke the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by collecting personal information from players under 13 without their parents' consent. It also objected to Fortnite's default settings, which turned on voice and text chat for children and teens, exposing them to strangers. Epic agreed to a $275 million civil penalty, the largest ever for breaking an FTC rule.
The second was about dark patterns: design choices that push people into decisions they would not otherwise make. The FTC said Fortnite's confusing button layout led players to make unwanted purchases with a single press, let children buy items without a parent's involvement, and locked the accounts of customers who disputed charges with their card companies. Epic agreed to pay $245 million in refunds.
The refunds
The $245 million was paid back to players in rounds. The FTC sent the first $72 million in December 2024. A second round of $126 million followed in June 2025, in almost one million payments to people who had filed claims. The deadline to claim was July 9, 2025.
That process is a reminder of how large the problem was. These were not a handful of complaints; they were hundreds of thousands of households saying they had been charged for things they did not mean to buy.
What changed in games
The settlement did not just punish Epic. It set out a list of things US regulators consider unfair, and other publishers took note:
- Purchase buttons that are easy to press by accident, especially without confirmation.
- Letting children spend without a parent's involvement.
- Punishing customers who dispute charges.
- Turning on chat with strangers by default for young players.
Two years later, the FTC used similar reasoning against HoYoverse, the maker of Genshin Impact. In January 2025, the company agreed to pay $20 million and to stop selling loot boxes to under-16s without parental consent. We cover that case, and the global picture, in our guide to loot box laws.
Why it matters
The Fortnite case moved the debate about game spending from "is this gambling?" to "is this fair?". That question is easier for regulators to answer, and it applies to almost every free-to-play game, not just ones with loot boxes. Europe's draft Digital Fairness Act, which leaked this week, takes the same approach, targeting dark patterns and requiring games to show real-money prices.
WGC's take: the cheapest fix in all of this is good design. A confirmation step, a clear price and a parent's approval for children cost very little to build, and they would have saved Epic hundreds of millions of dollars. Every studio making a free-to-play game today should read this case as a checklist.
If you played Fortnite during the years the case covered, the claims window has closed, but the protections the case created now apply to every player.