According to newly unsealed court filings, Google considered buying Epic Games as the companies sparred over Epic’s Fortnite Android app. Google had lifted some of its redactions in Epic’s antitrust complaint against Google, which Epic amended and refiled last month. The article talks about the court documents that reveal Google considered buying Epic during Fortnite.
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Google considered buying Epic
In recent years, Apple faced one of its most serious legal threats; a trial that threatens to upend its rock-hard control over the App Store, which brings in billions of dollars each year while feeding more than 1.6 billion iPhones, iPads, and other devices. On the other hand, Epic is an American video game and software developer and publisher based in Cary, North Carolina, also earning whopping billions from its game proceedings.
The complaint still omits many details about Google’s dealings with specific companies, but the new details reflect internal Google communications about the competition on the Android platform. “Not content with the contractual and technical barriers it has carefully constructed to eliminate competition, Google uses its size, influence, power, and money to induce third parties into anticompetitive agreements that further entrench its monopolies,” the updated complaint, available via The Verge, says.
Google has gone so far as to share its monopoly profits with business partners to secure their agreement to fence out the competition, has developed a series of internal projects to address the “contagion” it perceived from efforts by Epic and others to offer consumers and developers competitive alternatives and has even contemplated buying some or all of Epic to squelch this threat.
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeny recently tweeted about the situation, saying it was unclear whether Google would have negotiated or made a hostile takeover attempt. The internal messages discussing that possibility remain secret, and the complaint doesn’t indicate that Google ever reached out to Epic with these plans. It also doesn’t give a timeframe for the discussion — although it presumably happened after Epic started its plans to launch Fortnite on Android in 2018. In a tweet after this article’s publication, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said the plan “was unbeknownst to us at the time.”
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