Epic Games paid $520M after Fortnite's dark-pattern buttons charged players

Fortnite is free to download but sells in-game items — costumes, dance moves, weapons — and Epic charged for them through a tangle of counterintuitive buttons. Players were charged by pressing a single button while the game was loading, by pressing a button adjacent to one they meant to hit, and even by waking a sleeping device. The FTC said the dark-pattern design produced hundreds of millions of dollars in unauthorized charges, and for players under 18 there was no real parental consent before purchases.

On 19 December 2022 the FTC announced two settlements worth $520 million combined. One order required Epic to pay a $275 million civil penalty — the largest the FTC has ever obtained for violating a rule — for collecting personal data from children under 13 without verifiable parental consent. The other, for $245 million, covered the dark-pattern billing and the practice of locking the accounts of players who disputed the charges, warning them of lifetime bans.

By 2025 the refunds were still flowing. The FTC's administrator sent more than $72 million to 629,344 players in December 2024, and on 25 June 2025 it reopened claims and sent over $126 million more to 969,173 people, bringing the total refunded close to $200 million of the $245 million pot.