Epic Games Epic Games has announced it intends to introduce a functionality to Fortnite that allows players to return a purchase made in the last five minutes.
Great news for any parents out there if your kid nicks your card and spends hundreds of pounds of cosmetics, provided you become aware of their crime and can get to the console to undo it in the space of 300 seconds.
Epic has said it doesn’t want to benefit from “accidental purchases” or see players regretting a purchase, though it’s not entirely clear when this new feature will be added to the game.
After Redditor u/SpicyHabanero69 (via VG247) discovered and shared the existence of a “confirm purchase” screen in the the Japanese version of the game, Epic responded to accusations that it was holding back such a feature in the West as a sneaky way to make more money.
Epic explained:
We neither want to add friction for players nor do we want to benefit from accidental purchases or players regretting a purchase.
Our initial solution for this was to add a refund token system. As an ongoing iteration, we are going to introduce an ‘undo’ button to the store page that allows you to easily refund without using up a token within a 5 minute time window, assuming you haven’t started a match since purchase.
PlayStation 4 in Japan is a bit of special case due to X / O button meaning being swapped by default and there also being options to reverse the meanings of the buttons.
Some players responded to this move with further criticism, suggesting they’d rather see a Japan style confirmation screen rather than a brief window in which to undo a purchase.
Either way, Epic does seem to be taking steps to ensure accidental purchases become less of an issue, so that’s something.
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Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.