Epic Games paid over half a billion dollars over Fortnite

The short answer

In December 2022, Fortnite's maker agreed to pay more than half a billion dollars to settle two separate government actions: one over collecting children's data without parental consent, the other over game design that led to unwanted charges. The refunds are still being paid out years later. If your family plays Fortnite, it is worth knowing that the specific things the settlement targeted were defaults, chat switched on for everyone, and a purchase flow that made accidental buying easy, not the game itself.

What the evidence says

The FTC announced on 19 December 2022 that Epic Games would pay $275 million, then the largest civil penalty the agency had obtained for a rule violation, to resolve allegations it collected personal information from Fortnite players under 13 without verifiable parental consent, according to the FTC's announcement. The complaint said Epic enabled live voice and text chat by default for all users and made the setting hard to find, despite internal concerns the FTC says were raised inside the company as early as 2017. A separate $245 million order addressed what the agency called dark patterns: interface designs that let players be charged, for example, while a device was waking from sleep or by pressing a button next to the one they meant to press, and that let children spend real money without a parent's authorisation. The FTC also said Epic locked the accounts of customers who disputed unwanted charges. The case record confirms both orders and the date. The refund programme's record shows the agency had, by June 2025, distributed more than $126 million to roughly 969,173 claimants for unwanted charges, unauthorised child purchases through November 2018, and wrongful account lockouts, with further payments expected in 2026.

For context

The two orders addressed different problems under one settlement: a privacy rule about data collection from children, and a consumer-protection theory about interface design and billing, sometimes called a dark pattern when a design choice makes an unwanted outcome more likely than an intended one. Neither order rules that voice chat or in-game purchases are inherently harmful; it is a finding about specific defaults and purchase flows at Epic. The scale of the refund is itself a sign of how many households were affected by settings most people never adjusted.

A practical next step

If a child in your household plays a free-to-play game with in-app purchases, you might check the account's voice and text chat defaults together, since 'on unless you find the toggle' is exactly the pattern this case addressed.

• Do you know whether voice or text chat is on by default on the games your child plays, and where the toggle is?
• Has your child ever made a purchase you did not intend to authorise, and would you notice quickly if it happened again?
• Does the account require a parent's approval before spending, or just a saved payment method?

The settlement is a useful marker for what regulators consider an unfair default in games marketed partly to children, but it describes Epic's specific practices at the time, not a general verdict on gaming.