Epic Games has won its court battle with Google. The jury found that Google had been involved in anti-competitive behaviour to maintain its market position and that the linking of Google’s Play store and its billing system represents an illegal monopoly.
Over the course of the trial – covered brilliantly by The Verge – we learned that Google had struck sweetheart deals with certain developers as part of ‘Project Hug’, which meant some paid less than the standard 30% fee. Spotify skips the fee entirely, for example, and it offered Netflix a deal to pay just 10%.
Google was also revealed to have offered marketing money and engaged in other revenue sharing schemes to discourage the likes of Riot and Samsung from launching and growing their own app stores.
The trial also revealed that Google offered Epic Games $147m to launch Fortnite on the Play Store to stop the ‘contagion’ of developers releasing their own game launchers through browsers. Epic eventually launched the game through Google Play anyway, as its browser launcher was not picking up much traction.
Google even considered buying Epic Games in order to put Fortnite on Google Play and make it a key part of the Android games ecosystem.
Epic Games put out a celebratory statement saying that the verdict was “a win for all app developers and consumers around the world”.
“It proves that Google’s app store practices are illegal and they abuse their monopoly to extract exorbitant fees, stifle competition and reduce innovation,” Epic said. “Over the course of the trial we saw evidence that Google was willing to pay billions of dollars to stifle alternative app stores by paying developers to abandon their own store efforts and direct distribution plans, and offering highly lucrative agreements with device manufacturers in exchange for excluding competing app stores,“ the statement continues.
“Google imposes a 30% tax on developers simply because they have prevented any viable competitors from emerging to offer better deals,” Epic’s statement continued. “And Google executives acknowledged in Court that their offer of a 26% rate on third party payment options is a fake choice for developers. This is, of course, what we know. From the CEO down, Google employees willfully re-directed sensitive conversations to chat, knowing that their contents would be deleted forever.”
It’s not over, of course. Google plans to appeal, and The Verge says Google and Epic Games will meet Judge Donato to discuss potential remedies in the second week of January.
It now seems likely that Google will be forced to separate the Google Play store from Google Play Billing, allowing third party providers to handle in-app purchase payments. Measures may also be taken to allow developers to create and run their own app stores as they please, potentially dodging all or most of Google’s 30% cut from in-app purchases.
