I need to spill my guts out!

[SE_JonF]

@greggtwep16;569926

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… 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 keep missing the point that it is the online extension of a U.S. based country. Where you are when you choose to purchase the products is irrelevant, you are still engaging with a United States business. What you’re saying would be true if Epic had a physical entity in the EU through which U.S. sellers would be selling their products, but that isn’t the case . Furthermore, the fact that sellers outside the U.S. have to apply for an ITIN underlines that reality. They have to abide by U.S. laws, not the other way around. People keep erroneously citing Apple and Steam despite the fact that they are no different from Epic in this regard.

The Nintendo example was already discredited, refund policy had nothing to do with their decision to opt out of Brazil.

Again, at the end of the day it’s up to the consumer to know what rights they do and do not have. I highly recommend they actually read up on how these laws work, what jurisdictions apply and the terms they agree to when signing up to use a service. This is the same when figuring out whether or not you want to purchase a product. The information is out there, clear as day. Don’t take my word for it or anyone else in this thread, go and actually look yourself.

I see you’ve edited your post to include more information. You are correct, lawmakers are looking for ways to get around the inherent nature of the online marketplace -which is a border-less market. That hasn’t happened yet though, and isn’t likely for some time if ever given the considerable resistance they are facing from giant online distributors such as Amazon who have significant sway.