Fortnite Fined $520M for Invading Kids’ Privacy and Tricking Players

> And sure enough, Epic Games wrote in a blog post today that it believes this is an inflection point for evolving regulatory standards around online gaming. “The old status quo for in-game commerce and privacy has changed, and many developer practices should be reconsidered,” the company wrote. “We share the underlying principles of fairness, transparency and privacy that the FTC enforces, and the practices referenced in the FTC’s complaints are not how Fortnite operates.”

Sounds like Epic Games is about to try out regulatory capture.

This game is all about financial exploitation; spend real money on nothing. The great irony is they don’t want to follow AppStore rules and take an even bigger cut.

You can get fined for having mic on now? I know games that have bugs where open mic will turn on without you enabling it from time to time. This will never change, as the current way people program is just gluing poorly made libraries with not even applicable protocols like XMPP into their games and software. This reminds me of how in Fortnite you could not talk during the loading screen because they used a framework (UE4) that has some specific flows where you're meant to have a distinct loading screen and they didn't intend for players to maintain a party outside a session on a server. This could all be avoided with real programming but nobody does real programming anymore. It's amazing how games can have any legal implications at all, being things that matter the very least in society. All those redditor morons obsessed with civics who buy a game to put on their shelf are responsible for this.