To get Epic to release Fortnite on the Play Store, Google promised them $147 million.
To get Epic to release Fortnite on the Play Store, Google promised them $147 million.
Google feared that a "contagion" of defecting developers might have reduced its Android income by billions.
In court, Google acknowledged that Epic received a $147 million offer to release its popular game Fortnite on the Google Play Store for Android smartphones. The agreement, which was authorized and sent to Epic but rejected, according to Google's VP of Play Partnerships Purnima Kochikar, called for the money to be paid to the game publisher in three years' worth of "incremental funding" that would have ended in 2021. The intention was to stop a possible "contagion" of well-known programs avoiding Android's official store and, consequently, Google's hefty in-app purchase costs.
2018 saw the direct release of Fortnite on Android by Epic via its website rather than the Play Store. Because of this, it was able to sell V-Bucks, the in-game currency for Fortnite, without having to pay the commission that Play Store apps must. 2020 saw it give in, citing "scary, repetitive security pop-ups" among other things that had severely disadvantaged it.
However, it claimed in an antitrust case that was launched later that year and is still being debated by a jury that Google was panicked by its initial ruling. It referenced internal documents that stated Google tried to prevent other game developers (such as Blizzard, Valve, Sony, and Nintendo) from following Epic's example because it was afraid of a "contagion risk." Google allegedly tried to achieve this by providing exclusive privileges or even by purchasing Epic.
When Lawrence Koh, the now-former head of Google Play's games business development, took the stand on Tuesday, the "contagion" documents were brought up in court. They anticipated Google's worries that almost all of the industry's best game developers would leave Play within a few years of Epic's announcement, costing Google billions of dollars in lost revenue. According to court documents, if Fortnite were to disappear, there might be a direct revenue loss of between $130 and $250 million as well as a potential $3.6 billion downstream loss.
Google's stance is that while it was worried about games being removed from Play, there was nothing sinister about that. Kochikar testified, "We just wanted developers to choose Play." Additionally, Koh attested that placing games on the site "was the investment we thought was worth all the dollars"—especially considering that the developers may have initially decided to release their games on Apple's iOS platform.
On the other hand, Epic is utilizing these records to contend that Google has kept its Play Store an illegal monopoly because it fears competition for the distribution of Android apps. The fact that this arrangement exists doesn't prove it, but it does provide an intriguing window into how Google views its gaming business.
Reporting was supplied by Sean Hollister.
https://www.theverge.com
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