Why Age Checks Matter in Video Game Payment Processing

In December 2022 the maker of Fortnite agreed to pay the United States Federal Trade Commission $520 million, the largest privacy penalty the agency had ever obtained. Part of it, $275 million, was for collecting data from players under 13 without a parent’s consent. The rest covered charges that the game pushed players, many of them children, into spending money they never meant to spend. The case made one thing plain to every studio with a paid game: age is now a payment problem, and getting it wrong is expensive.

The COPPA Baseline

The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act sets the floor in the United States. A game that knowingly collects personal data from a child under 13, including a name or an email address, must get verifiable parental consent first. The Fortnite penalty of $275 million was for ignoring that rule at scale. COPPA reaches the payments team too, because the same under-13 user who cannot consent to data collection also cannot consent to a purchase.

Minors and Unauthorized Spending

Children spending without permission is a measured, expensive problem. In one survey, 40.8% of parents said their kids make in-app purchases without consent, and 67% worried about overspending. In roughly 40% of families, a child spends between $10 and $100 a month inside games. The pattern is old enough to have a legal history. Back in 2014 the same regulator made Apple refund more than $32.5 million to parents for charges their children ran up.

Refunds do not fully fix it either. Most parents never ask for one, and only about 30% of those who do get their money back, so the rest stays on the books as an unhappy customer and a likely chargeback. The Fortnite case added a sharper charge. Regulators said the game used confusing button layouts that nudged players into buying and let children spend without a parent ever entering the loop. That half of the settlement, $245 million, was about the checkout itself.

The Casino Standard

Casinos never had the luxury of guessing a player’s age. An operator must confirm a player is of legal age before the first bet, and that check is wired into the cashier itself. Studios moving into paid and casino-style mechanics can adopt the same rigor by using casino payment solutions that treat age and identity as a condition of payment, verified before money moves.

The gap between the two industries is closing fast. A game with a real-money store now has the same age duty a sportsbook does, and regulators have started treating it that way.

The Teen Gap

COPPA stops at 13, but the payment risk does not. A 15-year-old falls outside COPPA’s data rules and is still too young to gamble or to authorize large spending alone. Most teenagers already play video games, with one large survey finding that 85% of United States teens do, so much of the audience exposed to these payment flows is underage by default. Newer rules in Europe and several states aim at everyone under 18, well beyond the young children COPPA covers. For a payments team the practical effect is two thresholds to manage, one for data consent and one for adult-only spending, and a game that checks only for under-13s is still exposed on the second.

Age Verification Methods

Verifying age has moved well beyond a checkbox that asks a user to confirm they are old enough. Document checks match a passport or licence to a selfie, with liveness detection to defeat a borrowed photo. Database checks confirm a date of birth against trusted records in seconds. Age estimation reads a face or a behavior pattern to flag likely minors, then escalates only the uncertain cases to a full document check. Many operators run these as a waterfall, starting with the lightest method and adding friction only when a result is in doubt.

The point is proportion. A free app with no payments needs little. A game that lets a player load $200 onto an account needs the kind of check a casino runs, and each added step loses some real adult buyers, so the goal is the lightest check that still proves age.

The Regulatory Map

The rules are tightening on every front. United States states set a minimum age of 21 for online casino play and enforce it at the cashier. In Europe, platform-safety rules that took effect in 2024 push large online services to add age-assurance measures for minors. France went further with a technical standard in January 2025, backed by fines of up to 150,000 euros or 2% of global turnover for sites that fail to verify age properly. These moves are part of a wider response to the growing risks to kids in paid online spaces.

For a studio selling worldwide, the weakest market sets the risk. One country’s strict standard becomes the design target, because building a separate checkout for every jurisdiction costs more than meeting the highest bar everywhere.

Age Checks at the Payment Step

Age is easiest to enforce where the money changes hands. A credit card was once treated as proof of adulthood, but children use parents’ cards, and prepaid cards have no age attached at all, so the card alone proves nothing. Tying a verified age to the payment method, and re-checking it at cash-out, closes the gap the Fortnite case exposed.

A clean checkout also means no dark pattern nudging a minor toward a purchase they do not understand. The same confusing layouts that drew the Fortnite penalty are easy to remove once a studio decides the checkout should help players understand what they are buying.

Parental controls also work best on top of a verified age signal, since a self-declared age is easy for a child to fake. A parental controls setup paired with a real age check gives the studio a record that a genuine adult authorized the spend, which is the same evidence that wins a disputed charge later.

More Than a Compliance Cost

Age verification is easy to file under compliance cost, a tax the regulators impose and the finance team resents. The Fortnite settlement priced that mistake in record fines, mass refunds, and the reputational damage of being the game that charged children. The same checks that prevent it also produce cleaner data and a record of who approved each purchase. Age checking looks like friction until the first half-billion-dollar settlement, when it starts to look like the cheapest insurance a studio never bought.