They weren't getting refunded because kids were genuinely using their parents' credit cards. Parents are alleging fraud to the cc companies, but not reporting this as fraud legally.

> Parents are alleging fraud to the cc companies, but not reporting this as fraud legally.

Just so we are on the same page, is the issue that they are not calling the police and saying "my kid has used my creditcard, could you prosecute them for fraud?"

That's what's really happening, right? Parents have handed over their credit cards and are having some misgivings about the purchases their children are making. Have you met children? They don't need dark patterns to make bad decisions.

> The company also made it easy for children to make purchases while playing Fortnite without requiring any parental consent.

So the kids had their parent's credit card on file for a free to play game and this is Epic's fault? Wouldn't having their credit card on file to buy anything they want be consent at some level? The same level of consent as any other online shop?

The only reason for the settlement is that this is one of those "cost of doing business" fines for Epic. They are out of this for a relatively small amount of money, and the FTC gets a "win" out of it.

Oh, so yes to your question.

> Have you met children? They don't need dark patterns to make bad decisions

Exactly, thats why you are not allowed to sell them alcohol, drugs and worst of all, financial products like loans.

> That's what's really happening, right? Parents have handed over their credit cards and are having some misgivings about the purchases their children are making

Children below age of criminal responsibility can't be prosecuted. What exactly are you trying to accomplish?

I take it you have never tried to use the support system of many of these services? Yeah, you may sometimes get a good rep that will actually help you and refund you. More often times than not you are forced to jump through massive hoops, auto replies, no help, etc. to the point that you have to do a chargeback. Also, chargebacks are not always a guarantee, VISA (or whoever) does their own investigation to make sure you're in the right, so you would only likely go that route when you're confident that the service is in the wrong.

I refund routinely on Steam. The only times it doesn't work is if I've played more than 2 hours which seems fair. I don't see why I would be entitled to making a chargeback after I've played the game for that long. That would be like renting a movie, watch it and then make a chargeback.

> Why would you chargeback in Fortnite instead of just refunding?

It's really cool that Steam has a working refund system but I'm not sure it helps with the explanation of why refunding on Epic is an insurmountable challenge.

You're missing the point. The point being there is plenty of use cases that are not fraudulent ones.

Steam will even still give you refunds after 2 hours if you have a reason that convinces the customer service rep (e.g. performance or compatibility issues that you spent 3 hours running the game trying to fix)

I hope you are not trying to suggest that something Steam should be commended for rather than just the bare minimum. If the product being defective only becomes apparent after two hours then the product is still defective.

So if you don't like a movie you should have the right to a refund?

While it is the bare minimum, it's more than many companies will do.

I'm not familiar with the Fortnite cash shop, but do they refund hard currency or just "points"/ fun bucks?

If you purchased something in-game with "v-bucks" then you can get your v-bucks back if you still haven't actually used the item in a game yet, or if it was purchased in the last 30 days (up to 3 times). They don't usually refund actual money, as far as I can tell.

So effectively they don't provide refunds at all? Non-withdrawable store credit should probably be illegal too.

V-bucks aren't really store credit though. They're non-refundable and it makes sense because you can also get them through in-game actions.

Maybe an 'Oops! I didn't mean to do that.' undo button immediately after buying some. But it would be better just to make the checkout process explicit like they do on PC.

I'm sure they can manage to track which fakebux you paid for and which ones they gifted you. The is zero consumer benefit to having intermediate currrencies that cannot be be changed back into real money. It's entirely a dark pattern used to make you spend more by obscuring costs and generating leftover amounts that you can't really use without inserting more cash.