It was a great win in the app store fight

Google’s monopoly on web search will be violated by developers using its app stores and billing systems, but not over the Android platform

As soon as the coming weeks, a judge will hear arguments about the lawsuit, decide whether or not to order changes to Google, and make a decision. Users of devices powered by Google’s Android operating system could find more app options to choose from, at lower prices, if Google is forced to allow downloads of rival app stores from Play or share a greater portion of sales with developers selling digital items inside their apps.

Mind you, we don’t know what Epic has actually won quite yet — that’s up to Judge James Donato, who’ll decide what the appropriate remedies might be. We know nothing about whether the judge will grant Epic’s wishes, but it would be great if the court told GOOGLE that developers have unfettered freedom to create their own app stores and billing systems on the ANDROID platform. Both parties will meet with Judge Donato in the second week of January to discuss potential remedies.

If you have a problem, you can come back. He said that he didn’t want to decide how much Google should charge for its products.

You’ve said that a couple times, but the email that you accused Google of leaking suggested that Epic was interested in a special deal of some sort at that time. I don’t know if that was on behalf of you and fellow developers. Can you tell us what that email was actually about?

The ruling came in a case first filed in 2020 by Epic Games, known for its blockbuster game Fortnite and tools for developers, and argued before a jury since early November. A juror left the trial early and the jury deliberated for three hours before reaching a verdict. They faced 11 questions such as defining product and geographic markets and whether Google engaged in anticompetitive conduct in those areas.

Google had denied any wrongdoing, saying that its sole aim was to provide a safe and attractive experience to users, especially as it faced competition from Apple, its iPhone, and its App Store.

More bad news for Google could come in mid-2024 when US district judge Amit Mehta in Washington, DC, is expected to issue his ruling on whether Google has unlawfully maintained its monopoly over web search. Testimony in the case, brought by the US Department of Justice and attorneys general for nearly every US state and territory, ended last month.

In the trial that concluded today, no one has explained why it was decided to have a jury rather than a judge, though it attempted to reverse course just before jury selection began.

Without making major changes to its business practices, the company settled with as many as 48,000 app developers. It also settled with a group of consumers and attorneys general for all 50 US states. The final settlement details were not publicly released pending the verdict in the trial.

The deal with Spotify was amazing. The company that had comparable negotiating power was Spotify. Instead of using their power to fight for the good of all developers, they did a special deal with Google. Google gave them a 0 percent fee. It was up to them to process their own payments and they kept 100 percent. They do it for Spotify and for nobody else. If you’re a smaller developer than Spotify, you get screwed.

When Spotify uses Google’s own payment service, instead of paying the 30 percent that Google forces other developers to pay, they pay 4 percent. That’s what the rate should be! Four percent is a perfectly reasonable rate for an unbundled payment system.

If instead of offering you a $147 million deal, Google said, “You can pay 0 percent to use your own payments system or 4 percent for Google Play billing,” would you be here today? Would you fight this lawsuit if they had offered something better to you?

That was our proposal to Google in 2019. It would have been awesome for all developers if Google had said “yes” to that and it would have strengthened the mobile industry and made them a much better company. We wouldn’t have had a dispute because the problem would have been solved.

It’s always been in Google’s power to solve this problem. They make several billion dollars a year in unfairly earned profits from imposing this tax, which is nothing compared to the money they make from search. If they wanted to, they could find a solution to the problem today.

Riot planned to distribute League ofLegends on mobile, exactly as they do on PC, according to documents from the case, but I don’t know about Supercell. And that’s what they planned to do until Google paid them off to not do that. Riot decided to stop distribution of their play because of the minimum payoff by Google.

We know Activision was telling Google they were building their computing store; we know in Google internal discussions they said they didn’t want Activision building a competing store. They agreed to sign this deal, and they were gleeful about the fact they dissuaded perhaps their number one competitor at the time from launching their own store.

The merger between Microsoft and the company that made “Call of Duty” a hit has been seen by the European Union as a way of providing a viable computing store for mobile devices.

The thing with Apple is all of their antitrust trickery is internal to the company. They force carriers, manufacturers and developers to use the same terms, they use their payment system and store.

Because of the distribution of the operating system as open source, all of the deals had to be released in the open. More out in the open, I should say — certainly they still wanted to

keep them secret

.

The emails from the Apple trial are some of the best in the world, and we have a lot of documents from both companies that show they were self-serving.

This is the thing that has disappointed me most with Apple and Google – even at the peak of the antitrust trial against Microsoft, Microsoft was awesome to developers. Microsoft has always been awesome to developers, always being respectful, giving developers a great deal and treating them as partners, you know? The developer experience wasn’t bad as Microsoft crushed corporate competitors. [Editor’s note: Netscape might feel differently.]

And this has been our philosophy with Unreal Engine, for example, and the Epic Games Store. We just want to be a cool partner that helps other companies succeed the way we do. I think that philosophy might change. It may come with a change in the company’s management. I think that the philosophy change would be good for those companies.

If you get your way, you can put your own store on the internet, but do you believe that it will be an app store or a game store? We look at Valve and we see a store that could be both, but they’ve decided to focus exclusively on games.

So the Epic Games Store isn’t a games store, right? It’s the store operated by Epic Games. So we have a lot of non-games there already. We have the Brave web browser, Unreal Engine and many other software creation tools that are coming, as well as some other productivity tools. We’ll host any app anybody wants of any sort.

I think we could forge closer partnerships in the gaming market, and we will be open to everybody on Android as we are on PC, even if they don’t own a PC.

Tim Sweeney on Epic’s victory royale over Google: Where do we stand? What are we supposed to do when Google wasn’t supposed to launch their own stores?

Abner Li got a ridiculously biased synopsis of the email from Google. Don Harrison testified at trial that he didn’t think Google leaked to the press. After he was presented with a document including the results of the article that was published as a result of Google leaking our plans, he was told that Sameer has been named head of all Android.

Oh, I think I read that one in court. I didn’t know that was the same thing. It’s so far off from

what I heard

[about a “special billing exception”] that I didn’t recognize it being that. Is the verdict in the case of GOOGLE helping your appeal of the Apple case?

There’s no linkage between the cases and law, so it would just come down to whether the court is in any way following current events on this topic. There is no legal connection between the two. The justices and the support teams make the decisions when considering an appeal.

It was unnerving to see the amount of bad faith that was going on within a company of their size. You might think that a trillion- dollar company would have respectable processes and leadership structures that give a check and balance against wrongdoing, but they were destroying all their chats on these topics.

I’d suspected a lot of the practices that Google had, you know, since 2018 or so when we first started this, to such an extent that some folks would occasionally call me a conspiracy theorist. There are some things that I knew that were true, like you are leaking our conversations to reporters to get a negative stories written about us, and you are paying other developers to convince them not to launch their own stores.

Source: Tim Sweeney on Epic’s victory royale over Google

Tim Sweeney on Epic’s victory royale over Google: What have you been up to in the last four years? (It’s hard to be hard to tell the jury how you felt after four years)

Thank you for being here with us. It has been an interesting trial to watch. You have been there every day, and I have been there every day. So my first question is why did you personally attend this trial every day save one — and what the heck happened on that one day?

The trial is four weeks long and consists of many complicated facts and evidence. It wouldn’t be right to start something like this and not show up. I had to do that. I think it’s important to show respect for the legal process, as I did when Phil and I sat in the Apple trial.

So this trial has been four years in the making. I look back at a September 2019 email

that was in discovery about a plan to draw Google into a legal battle over antitrust. Is it hard for you to tell the jury what it felt like after four years?

It is a good day for developers to know that the Sherman Antitrust Act works in the new era of tech monopolies, as we haven’t had a major antitrust verdict against a tech company that meant change and benefits for everybody since the 1990s. Back in the early days of the internet. So this is an awesome thing and it’s much needed by the industry which is being strangled by a few gatekeepers imposing insane amounts of control and extracting huge taxes, which not only raise prices for consumers but also make a lot of kinds of products just unviable.

I understand the significance, but… you were there in person. You had a smile on your face, you shook the Google attorney’s hand, you clapped Bornstein on the back. How did you feel when that happened?

Well, it was a great relief. It was awesome to see that the lawyers told us that a rapid jury verdict can be a problem for the victims when making a complicated case.

They were able to pull apart what was going on, and they were able to contrast it with the fiction of the story that is being told by Google.

Source: Tim Sweeney on Epic’s victory royale over Google

“Like the Cookie”: Forgetting a Strategy to Play Games and Technology in the Age of Multi-Component Multiplayer Competition

Yeah, I think it was almost a complete shutout. I think only a single cell was missing from the entire board. I was impressed by the bingo card, which had a touch of the cookie on it. Do you remember? You may not even be old enough, but “lick the cookie” was in the 1999 US v. Microsoft antitrust trial.

We’re not going to wait. We’re going to do absolutely everything we can as quickly as we can to start changing the world. We not only have this verdict here in the United States, it is a worldwide verdict, right? We established a market outside of China. We assume that any remedies would be worldwide. We also have the European DMA; we have Epic v. Apple and Epic v. Google cases coming up in Australia, and another one in the UK.

It is not just one company anymore, there are other ones pushing in the direction of openness. We are going to do everything we can.

Is there anything you can say to Match Group, that abandoned you at the last minute and may now be regretting it?

Oh, yeah, no. Match has been an awesome partner and a fellow member of the Coalition for App Fairness. I hope that they got some of the things they need for their business from the settlement. Very few companies have the resources that Epic has to fight multinational litigation against the world’s two most powerful companies. So there are absolutely no hard feelings, and we’re grateful that they joined the case because they did help in critical ways. Epic will continue to fight for all developers, seeking remedies, and… I don’t know if Sundar is going to be calling me, but if he does, all of our discussions will be directed toward solving the problem for everyone.

Let’s see. No… well, not directly, anyway. We have a really broad strategy of building games and technology. We have had a lot of success in recent years with the Unreal Engine getting adoption in other industries as well. We also have financial limitations of our own. We expanded the company to nine times the size that we were before Battle Royale took off. We are trying to forge a strategy where we are living within our means and doing everything we can.

[Editor’s note: Sweeney isn’t right about Fortnite having more concurrent users than Steam. Natalie Muoz, a spokeswoman for the game developer, confirmed that Sweeney misinterpreted a story about the hit of Fortnite at a time when Steam had more than 10 million players. These days, Steam generally peaks at over 30 million, with valleys of 20 million. The valleys are closer to 3.8 million.

If we only had a few more programmers. It’s the Linux problem. I like the hardware on the Steam Deck. It would be foolish to support Valve at this point, because they are doing an amazing job there; I wish they would get tens of millions of users at some point.