Limited Run Games Settles Class-Action Lawsuit Accusing Them Of Giving Customer Info To Facebook “Without Consent”, Last Decades’ Worth Of Customers Eligible To File Claim
As if their ‘late-by-three-years-on-average’ production style, lack of quality control, or eagerness to fire employees over Twitter follows wasn’t proof positive enough that Limited Run Games is a less-than-reputable business, the physical video game distributor, while still denying any wrongdoing, has recently agreed to settle the class-action lawsuit brought against them regarding their apparent illegal sharing of customers’ personally identifying with Facebook parent company Meta.
The legal pot first began boiling for LRG on December 27th, 2024, when two individuals, John Carbone and Ryan Adkins, filed a class action lawsuit against the video game retailer on the grounds that they had “caused Plaintiffs’ video game purchases to be sent along with Plaintiffs’ personally identifiable information to Facebook and upon information and belief, other third parties, without Plaintiffs’ knowledge, agreement, or consent each time Plaintiffs requested and viewed
video content and video games sold throughout the [LRG] Website.”
Accordingly, this non-consensual knowledge sharing was facilitated by LRG’s use of Meta Pixel, formerly Facebook Pixel, a JavaScript-based analytics tool described official support documents as “a code that you put on your website” that “allows you to measure the effectiveness of your Meta advertising by understanding the actions people take on your website.”
“Defendant ‘purposely installed and implemented’ tracking technologies that it used to transmit its customers’ Personal Viewing Information to unauthorized parties, including Facebook. Defendant’s knowledge as to its conduct is evidenced by the fact that it chose to track its customers’ interactions with the Website and Apps using Facebook Pixel, which tracked, recorded, and sent Facebook its customers’ Website activity.”
The use of this tool, the defendants claimed, was a violation of the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988, which holds that any “video tape service provider who knowingly discloses, to any person, personally identifiable information concerning any consumer of such provider shall be liable to the aggrieved person for the [relevant] relief.”
LRG, unsurprisingly, denied these accusations, and to this day “continue to assert their unawareness and non-consent of Defendant’s tracking and transmissions of their video viewing or video game purchase history to third parties.”
However, regardless of this disagreement regarding their criminal culpability, both the company and the plaintiffs ultimately agreed to avoid the ugliness of continuing the trial and instead settle the case for a “total settlement fund amount” of $2,720,000 USD, as to be paid by LRG to “all persons, even those who did not have a Facebook account, … who accessed the Limited Run Game Service in the United States and watched a pre-recorded video or purchased a video game containing a Cut Scene between January 1, 2016 to June 20, 2025.”
(And yes, for those wondering, the specific mention of a ‘cut scene’ is how the VPPA, whose language only applies to ‘video tapes’, is able to come into play in this situation.)
To this end, affected LRG customers can claim their share of the settlement, which will be proportionally equal for all customers and depends on just how many actually complete the process, by completing and submitting the relevant forms via the aptly named https://www.limitedrungamessettlement.com/, as hosted and run by the third-party Kroll Settlement Administration.
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