I need to spill my guts out!

[anonymous_user_6634b661]

@SE_JonF;569904

It doesn’t matter if not every seller lives in the U.S. Your content is being distributed by an N.C. company in the U.S. In the U.S. each state’s refund laws defer to the policy of the company who’s products a consumer has purchased. There are no federal refund laws, only states.

Companies only need to follow international laws if there is a physical entity there by which they are selling/manufacturing. The UE4 Marketplace is an online operation based in the U.S. That means it need only abide by U.S. laws, the same laws you are agreeing to abide by when you agreed to the EULA. You may want to review the clause regarding governing law and jurisdiction. This is also why an ITIN is required for sellers outside the U.S.

If what you’re saying is correct (it isn’t, but purely for the sake of argument) then sellers would have to file taxes in every country which houses a consumer of their product, which would leave us *owing *money to several countries. Not to mention swamped in paperwork.

Sellers are absolutely fine when it comes to this knowledge, the people who need to do some research are some of the individuals in who are terribly misinformed when it comes to this particular subject. There’s a lot of misleading information in being peddled around as fact, and that does a disservice to consumers who actually need to learn the truth of how things work and what their rights actually are. Steam’s refund policy is entirely voluntary. The Valve Corporation is a U.S. based company just like Epic, and abides by U.S. laws when it comes to refunds.

Now to discussion of whether users deserve to have a refund for any reason, I’m surprised to see this conversation continue. The same people are going in circles saying the same things, obviously no one is willing to concede their position regardless of the facts so why find different ways to word the same thing over and over again? Just seems like a colossal waste of time to me, but that’s only my personal observation. =)

While in theory what you say might be correct (I can’t say for sure I’m not even a US law expert (I’m from the US) let alone how laws work between countries) but in practice this is definitely not the reality. Until the marketplace gets big enough to get on other countries radar it might not matter but when that pie gets big enough the other countries will force Epic to abide by local law if they wish to keep doing business within their borders (or electronic equivalent). There are many examples of this whether Apple (another U.S. company), Steam, etc. (even those without physical entities). Until that time occurs companies usually do just follow their own EULA (and even after for countries that don’t have refund requirements like the EU and a few others). In general as I said over the past few years and a few thousand sales about 25% come from countries with refund requirements. It’s not a majority about 51% comes from the U.S. but the refund requirement countries isn’t negligible either.

Epic certainly is free to come up with whatever terms they want and for a time they can even probably get away with not abiding by local laws in the EU, but eventually if push comes to shove and enough EU customers complained they would either be forced to abide by local laws or they would not be allowed to do business there and there are some financial and technical means (not perfect obviously netflix customers got around it for awhile) that they can make it difficult to do business there. Even the big guys don’t mess around with this. It’s why EULA’s are usually written like “All sales are final except where required by local law”. There are numerous interesting cases that can be looked up online to show you how it generally goes (some without physical entities as well). There are many more tools that each country has as far as punishment goes than just preventing physical shops opening enough so that in general if a company thinks its too expensive a proposition they will actually pull out like the previous Nintendo/Brazil example.

You mentioned tax and this is also another case of local law dictating how companies operate. Whether were talking about sales tax, VAT (EU), or other local equivalent. There are also interesting cases online that go along similar paths (again even some without physical entities). In reality until its big enough that the local politicians start salivating at another possible revenue source it doesn’t matter but if that day comes you can be assured that they do come knocking and it usually isn’t the companies that “win”. Yes there are international treaties but in general they are quite involved to the point that very few lawyers understand them, so I’d rather look to what is actually going on the ground than try to figure out that mess.