Fortnite has been the subject of lawsuits and other regulatory action a number of times over the years regarding its FOMO-driven item shop practices, and now we’ve got another one for the pile. A new proposed class-action suit filed in California and Texas, as reported by Polygon, takes aim at “fake countdown timers” that would seemingly indicate that an item is leaving the shop imminently–even though very often items would stick around for days or weeks after the timer expired.
This suit is not, however, taking issue with the Fortnite item shop as it exists today. The timers in question were removed from Fortnite in 2023 as a result of action by regulators in The Netherlands, and replaced last May with new disclaimers on each item in the shop declaring the exact date and time they will leave the shop. So this suit is about Epic’s alleged sins of the past.
Before 2024, the Fortnite item shop was a much more nebulous place. Players were simply never told how long things would stay in the shop–when something appeared, it might stay for a day, a week, or a month, but there was no sure way to know. Sometimes the official Fortnite Twitter would announce that an item would be leaving, but those warnings usually came just hours before they left.
Likewise, dataminers could tell what sections the shop would have when it reset–but not until just two hours before. And on top of that, the only way to buy things is by actually being inside the game, which made it more difficult to make snap purchases and required players to keep the game installed and updated in case something they wanted returned.
Because of the action taken in The Netherlands, these issues have already been fixed in the game itself, by placing specific countdowns for each item in the shop. So the new lawsuit is apparently specifically about damages, rather than correcting the way the shop works–according to the suit, the plaintiffs are children who “bought items from the Fortnite Item Store that Epic advertised with misleading countdown timers,” and the proposed class to be compensated is Fortnite players in the USA who were under 18 years old when they made a purchase while these timers were present.
This lawsuit is still in its earliest stages, however, so it may be some time before anything happens with this. In the meantime, the FTC is still slated to make more payments to players as part of its refund settlement with Epic. In 2023, the FTC levied Epic with a massive fine, claiming it “unlawfully charged players for unwanted purchases, let children rack up unauthorized charges without their parents’ permission, and blocked some users who disputed wrongful charges from accessing their purchased content.”
