This is one of those headlines that's put out to make the FTC look a lot more productive and worthwhile than it actually is.
Others here have already pointed out that this is a drop in Fortnite's bucket of money (5.8 billion just in 2021), let alone Epic's. A larger point to be made is that it's an even smaller drop in the bucket of this type of F2P model ravaging both core games and the mobile market to an even larger extent. We could go down the list of games and count the billions made in and out of the US, and it will all go almost entirely uninterrupted.
For Epic though, it might be a bit of a signal from the FTC and maybe even some in congress that they need to get in line or get higher on the lobbying tally.
In 2022, 219 clients lobbied Federal Trade Commission. See the details.
www.opensecrets.org
To say nothing of how this quarter+ billion in penalties is going to be used or where it will be funneled, by an administration that is already spending more money than it has sense. To say nothing of the fact that this minute sum of refunds is not going to reverse or change the culture of instant gratification and easy-dopamine pushed by corporations, incentivized by government, and abetted by parents and peers.
While this sounds very heroic now, the truth is that the majority of this revenue come from grown adults whom are still susceptible to the methods talked about here. Not much can or even should be done to stop that legislatively under a supposedly society and market. And anyone who got "duped" by Epic now is probably not going to be hard to dupe in the future.
