Panic passes Trump tariff refunds back to the Playdate customers who paid them - Ars Technica
Panic’s tariff refunds come as Nintendo is fighting off a proposed class-action lawsuit demanding similar refunds for tariff costs plaintiffs say the company passed on to consumers. In a July response to that lawsuit, Nintendo said that its customers “voluntarily pa[id] a purchase price and receive[d] a product in return,” and that there isn’t “anything ‘unjust’ about Nintendo retaining money that it may receive from the government as tariff refunds.” Nintendo itself was forced to sue the Trump administration earlier this year to get a court order for the prompt refund of the illegal tariffs it paid. Thus far, major shipping companies have been the most prominent corporations voluntarily offering tariff refunds directly to customers.
“It just felt like the right thing to do.”
Panic, the indie game publishers behind the quirky, yellow crank-sporting Playdate gaming handheld, is issuing refunds to customers who had to shoulder the cost of inappropriate tariffs imposed by the Trump administration this year.
The news comes months after the Supreme Court said in a February ruling that those tariffs were illegal, which also demanded that the administration refund the companies that had to temporarily pay the import taxes. In an update posted on the Playdate help site this week, Panic noted that it has finally “begun to receive refunds of the tariffs we paid in the last year” and had consequently “refunded all tariffs charged to customers.”
In the initial version of that tariff note, Panic explained that it couldn’t afford to simply “absorb” the 19 percent tariffs it was being charged to import Playdate hardware made overseas because “our margins on Playdate are low.” As such, while the tax was in effect, it was passed along to customers as an explicit subtotal line item at the bottom of all Playdate orders. That’s in contrast to companies like Nintendo, which vaguely cited “market conditions” and tariff “uncertainty” in raising the asking price of legacy hardware and some Switch 2 accessories last year.
Speaking to Game Developer, Panic co-founder Cabel Sasser said filing paperwork to claw back these taxes and processing tariff refunds for customers took a fair bit of backend work. Still, he said returning that money to Playdate purchasers in the end was a no-brainer. “It’s just not our money to keep, and it felt really good to give it back,” Sasser said. “That’s an easy way to know you made the right decision.”
“It just felt like the right thing to do,” Panic wrote in a refund email message shared on Reddit.
Panic’s tariff refunds come as Nintendo is fighting off a proposed class-action lawsuit demanding similar refunds for tariff costs plaintiffs say the company passed on to consumers. In a July response to that lawsuit, Nintendo said that its customers “voluntarily pa[id] a purchase price and receive[d] a product in return,” and that there isn’t “anything ‘unjust’ about Nintendo retaining money that it may receive from the government as tariff refunds.”
Nintendo itself was forced to sue the Trump administration earlier this year to get a court order for the prompt refund of the illegal tariffs it paid. In an earnings presentation this summer, Nintendo said it has received $300 million in tariff refunds and that those costs “were primarily borne by the company rather than passed on to consumers through product prices.”
Over 100 other companies, including Xbox maker Microsoft and PlayStation maker Sony, are facing similar consumer lawsuits seeking refunds for tariff-related price increases. Thus far, major shipping companies have been the most prominent corporations voluntarily offering tariff refunds directly to customers.