Google Offered $147 Million for Fortnite

New developments continue to occur in the ongoing antitrust case between Google and Epic. According to the latest news, Google offered Epic Games 147 million dollars to add Fortnite to the Play Store.

Google, Epic Games in the lawsuit filed Android It is trying to prove that there is no monopoly in its market. In this case, employees from various companies sit on the witness stand one by one. The statements given by these witnesses also shed light on what happened between the two companies in the past.

Google’s VP of gaming partnerships Purnima Kochikarpreviously filed a lawsuit against Epic Games in court. $147 million They announced that they had made an offer. It was stated that this support payment offer, which would be spread over three years, was presented to Epic Games but was rejected.

Google fears publishers will abandon Play Store

This case is actually not new, we saw the first signs of it in 2021. Epic, which made Fortnite downloadable on its own site in 2018, was also selling V-Bucks on its own site. V-Bucks Not selling through the store meant that Google could not receive commission from the Play Store.

According to the allegations, which were the subject of a lawsuit filed at that time and re-expressed today, Google was horrified by Epic Games’ approach. According to Google’s internal company correspondence put forward in court, Fortnite Even though it is a big enough game, Google’s main concern was not not being able to get a commission from Fortnite, but the idea of ​​publishing its own applications as a 3rd party and spreading it to major manufacturers such as Blizzard and Nintendo. According to estimates, in such a situation, Google $3.6 billion He was going to lose.

In his statement, Kochikar stated that the developers themselves to choose While expressing their wishes, he also said that the investments they made in this field were reasonable. Kochikar also reminded that developers may first publish applications on iOS. Epic Games The side presents these correspondences within the company as evidence that Google is illegally using them to create a monopoly.

Source :
https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/8/23953262/google-epic-fortnite-play-store-investment-antitrust-trial


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