> Get punished

But, this isn't even a punishment. In game currency isn't real. It doesn't cost the company anything. So, this is 'be found guilty and be forced to go back to your junkies and give them their next hit of crack for free.'

I can imagine the ad banners: "Thousands of players will win new loot, will you be one? Play to find out".

>So, this is 'be found guilty and be forced to go back to your junkies and give them their next hit of crack for free.'

It's worse, like you said, the in-game currency isn't even real, unlike a hit the dealer has to hand out for free...

It's actually less "real" than Bitcoin. I haven't read the Fortnite TOS, but game companies always grant themselves unilateral permission to create/destroy in-game items/etc whenever they please.

AFAIK know, there's no trading in Fortnite. Games like Hearthstone or League of Legends where there is no way to exchange your goods for anything outside the game (except maybe selling the account as a whole) are indeed nowhere as real as bitcoin. On the otherhand, if it was a Valve game where you can trade items or sell them on the market place, then yes, those have a real value. Although dumping $78m of items in such a market place would probably collapse the item economy?

You can buy a car with bitcoin, but you cannot buy a car with fortnite bucks, that's generally the metric I use to tell how real a currency is and how usable it is.

Bitcoin supply is fixed. In-game currency gets created with a database query.

And they're not giving everybody billions. They're forgoing some fraction of $.07B that represents the revenue they would have otherwise captured. My guess is the fraction of people who spend less on these games because they got a little free in-game currency is near-zero and they might actually see a bump in revenue because they can now send out a marketing blast telling inactive users they have a reason to come back.

Ingame currency cannot be sold or transferred and is 100% lost if the publisher decides to ban you.

In other words, it's not really comparable to any cryptocurrency. Heck, even Steam's stickers/pictures you can unlock by playing games are more of a currency as you can sell (and buy) them for real money.

It’s far less real than Bitcoin if you can’t trade it on an open market.

This is like paying a settlement to employees in a company script instead of legal tender.

> To see this isn't true let's imagine they give away billion points to each player at once. How will their profits from that game change? I expect a big drop.

I wonder about that. The motive in the in-game economy is to have, and spend, more than other players, right? Handing out in-game money to all participants might disrupt things in that everyone can now buy the fancy in-game items, but the competitive/relative component presumably remains. If you want even more in-game items than other players, the dynamic is still there: you still need to pay up.

I mean, they could just devalue the in-game currency. Purchasing said currency would be cheaper, and in game items would be more expensive. It'd be a short-term disruption, but ultimately it wouldn't cost the company much directly, other than temporarily dissatisfied users.

You could even mitigate the former by compensating players by providing them more currency in proportion to the pre-devaluation purchasing power of their virtual wallet.

> they could just devalue the in-game currency

Item prices are fixed by the developer, aren't they? edit I suppose that just kicks the stone down the road. There would still be devaluation in the sense that scarce and expensive items become commonplace.

The item prices could always be "re-fixed" by the developer. There's no reason they must to remain static, especially if there was some "give billions of the currency to everybody" that was somehow unable to be rolled back.

Yes and no...their currency is in their playground. They can manipulate it however they want (though I wonder if that's even legal/would bring on another class action). They can't manipulate the dollar to reduce the impact, though.

I'm being pedantic, but no currency is "real". This one allows players to buy thing, which they are likely to want to do since they have in the past (and cared enough to start a class action over). You deciding that those goods are "hits of crack" is entirely subjective.

However it is true that it only costs Epic the lost revenue from selling those v-bucks. If a freely-tradable currency was emitted to cover debt, you'd have the penalty of devaluation, but that is not the case here. Of course that makes no difference for the players, that's only about punishment.

One time I bought a Nissan Versa. It had a Continuously Variable Transmission in it. They knew that they broke constantly, and they sold it anyway. They lied to me and said my transmission was fine a few months before the warranty was over, so they wouldn't have to replace it. Years after I traded that car in and it went immediately to a junk yard, Nissan settled a class action lawsuit over it. The compensation? A voucher for a few thousand towards a new Nissan.

I promise that when I joined a class action lawsuit over Nissan screwing me over, my goal wasn't to buy more Nissans. I would hazard a guess that many players who felt cheated enough by Epic to join a lawsuit against them likely feel similar.

A few years ago the state of Oregon sued oracle over their failed implementation of their ACA marketplace. They settled for a bunch of free oracle licenses. I scratched my head over that one.

> I'm being pedantic, but no currency is "real".

It is real in the sense that you can chose where you spend it. While this is like coupons. It may have value but that is very limited and therefore does not qualify as currency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store Somehow feels familiar.

>How is this allowed?

You are pretty much assuming they are liable for the allegations in the complaint against them.

Settlements for low value are a sign that plaintiffs view their chances of success (including being awarded substantial damages) as being low.

So one way of looking at this is, Epic did nothing wrong, and they are giving away essentially nothing to make the plaintiff go away.

If plaintiffs thought they had a good case, they wouldn't take monopoly money.

Notably, the attorneys aren't taking monopoly money.

> Additionally, the attorneys who brought the lawsuit (see FAQ 10) will ask the Court to award them attorney’s fees and expenses in an amount not to exceed $11,300,000.00, for the time, expense and effort expended in investigating the facts, litigation, and negotiating the Settlement. The Class Representatives will also ask the Court for a payment of up to $75,000 collectively for their time, effort, and service in this matter.

https://www.epiclootboxsettlement.com/Home/Faq

The lawyers get real money, and the victims get fake money. That's the real scandal. Our tort system is broken.

Is the risk-adjusted price that the lawyers are being paid unusually high? Lawyers being expensive doesn't really mean "Our tort system is broken".

It does, because it diverts money from the people who are actually harmed to people who advocate on their behalf; and raises the threshold for a class-action suit in general, as suits that are "too cheap" are not worth anyone's time.

$11,375,000.00 will be payed by EPIC ? if yes, it looks like a corruption scheme

The settlement could also be low because the lawyers on the plaintiff side were not acting in the best interests of the people they were representing, just in their own best interests.

The plaintiffs may just value what's being offered. It might be money they'd have otherwise spent.

Not my cup of tea, but I run a mile from any game that requires I shovel cash into it to get ahead

They probably saw their chances of winning against EPIC’s legal team being very low. That legal team is stacked atm.

Similar strategies have been used before; seven or so years after opening a lawsuit about a data breach at Zappos, claimants were offered 10% coupons for the Zappos online store.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/zappos-data-breach-settlement-...

Yep, I remember getting Ticketmaster credit for their class action lawsuit.

I owned an '76 Chevy pickup and GM sent a coupon worth $1000 off the purchase of a brand new pickup as a settlement.

Never used it, but I assume Dealer Keeps All Incentives applied.

(They had side-saddle gas tanks that increased the chances of a fire in an accident.)

https://www.lieffcabraser.com/defect/gm-pickup-fuel-tanks/

I got tons of free tickets in that one. I was never able to find an event to spend them on. What a fiasco.

It's legal because both sides agreed to settle for it.

If it was an individual suing Epic, and they agreed to go away in return for some shiny digital magic beans, you wouldn't see anything wrong with that. What's different if a million customers settle for it?

Customers can opt out of the class action, or start their own competing one. What would be a real problem is if other customers opted out, sued Epic individually, didn't settle, and the judge used the "payout" from the previous settlement to decide what a fair compensation would be. That hasn't happened here.

> It's legal because both sides agreed to settle for it.

I bet the lawyers representing the class aren't getting paid in VBucks. There are really three sides - Epic, the consumers, and the lawyers.

The fact that class actions are opt-out instead of opt-in is a big part of the problem.

There are lots of things that are still illegal even if both sides agree to it. Slavery for instance. Also all the things covered by consumer protection litigation, which top commenter is probably thinking of.

The conditions/clauses of the agreement must not be illegal.

Hmm, I’m guessing the lawyers behind the suit aren’t getting paid in loot.

Lol, I'm sure every single person in the class action suit agreed to the settlement, and otherwise would be able to afford to sue them again. Right.

Settlements are decided by a single class representative, and other class members are often not given notice of their right to opt-out or counter-sue.

And that's why you'd opt into a class action in the first place. You have a problem, you elect someone to handle it for you, give them decision making power and accept the outcome they've been able to achieve. It's just democracy, no?

All of this makes sense except for the bit about democracy. That's unrelated; this happens to be a process that's in use here, but it would work just as well in a monarchy.

Is it even about punishment? This is a civil case about loot-boxes.

The settlement is to pay off the lawyers and make the case go away.

I'm not that morally opposed to loot boxes and I don't believe any laws were broken. What kind of punishment are you looking for?

I hope the lawyers are also paid with in-game currency.

Or exposure

A disincentive to continuing the activity the class action suit was brought for.

In theory, class action lawsuits are either or both 1) compensate victims 2) "force" company to stop activity society deems "bad"

Victims care about #1, the rest of us want #2 so we don't become victims in the future.

In this case, stop exploiting addiction and other human psychology for profit via loot boxes.

The point of the settlement is to hit a company hard enough so they stop before doing something like this again.

Using in game currency and not real money is absolutely not going to achieve this.

No, that would be the purpose of a judgement. This isn't a judgement, it's a settlement. To Epic, the purpose is to make this go away. To those suing, the point is take a small but guaranteed windfall rather than risk a lengthy and uncertain court process.

It reminds me of how Nintendo settled US AG lawsuits on price fixing with coupons for Nintendo products. There's definitely a precedent.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-07-26-fi-276-st...

This would be like the big tobacco settlement being: big tobacco will pay smokers 100 billion tobacco bucks redeemable for cigarettes at an exchange rate of 100 tobacco bucks per cigarette.

With cigarettes, there's at least a real product there that has some cost to the company that made it.

With epic game currency, it's just a bunch of bits that could be created without any resource use by the company. They could create 10x more game currency at no more cost to the company.

Some dev has to run an INSERT statement. And maybe a test case. Cheap.

It's because this is a settlement out-of-court. Basically the lawyers thought the case was really weak so they took what they could get. Or perhaps they were corrupt.

This is common and there is some psychology involved in how to create these scenarios.

Basically you can scare the government into thinking the state’s actions will reduce competition (because your company wont exist anymore if you pay). The government uses so much energy trying to create/continue private sector competition that they don’t want to be directly responsible for creating closer to a monopoly of the remaining companies in the sector.

So they’ll accept these consequence free settlements, or even get behind settlements that actually are advertisements.

The court here is granting approval of the settlement.

It's like a casino settling with victims of an addiction machine with tokens for other games that can't be cashed out.

The question is whether the class action suit's intent is to punish them (as in, did they commit a crime?), or to get compensation for their behaviour. If the latter, then the suing parties probably agreed to them settling via in game currency.

Because the regulators are completely captured.

Please don't post ideological battle comments and flamebait to HN. There's no information here, just a trope repetition; that makes this strictly a discussion-lowering comment. We penalize accounts that post like this, so please don't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

What regulators, though? Class sued the company and agreed to these ridiculous terms. I'd see a role to question maybe the integrity of the lawyers accepting the deal, or the mechanics of entering/disputing/leaving class action lawsuits in this world where now class members can easily reach into the many, many millions. But, like another commenter posted, if these were just two parties agreeing to this (which in some sense it is), we wouldn't have a problem with this at all.

> What regulators, though?

Online gambling regulators.

Remember this next time the HN crowd gets their pitch forks out against Apple and their dispute with Epic. Who is really the “evil” company here.

They can both be evil.