The lawyers in the Epic Games’ antitrust lawsuit against Google have accused the tech giant of presenting Activision-Blizzard, maker of “Call of Duty”, an eye-watering $360 million in incentives three years ago to release its video game on the “Play” app store.
The case targets Google’s Android app marketplace and has seen the Epic lawyers claim that Google depended on payments to game and app developers, codenamed “Project Hug” internally, to intentionally “bribe and block” competitors.
As the second U.S. antitrust Epic Games has brought to court against Google, the tech company is in a lot of hot water not only with Epic but the U.S. Justice Department.
Credit: Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google is battling it out with the Feds in terms of its alleged monopoly over the online search market and, additionally, its digital advertising practices and its “Maps” business.
Epic attorney Lauren Moskowitz claims the payments to Activision-Blizzard and other developers were part of Google’s plan to quiet the “noise” over its strategy of its 30% cut of profits from in-app purchases, Bloomberg reported.
In Google’s camp, the lawyers have rejected any misconduct, saying that the fees to developers were reasonable payment in a competitive app market and that developers who collected payments were not stopped from designing their own app stores.
According to an uncensored edition of Epic Games’ complaint against Google, the tech titan secured at minimum 24 agreements with leading app developers.
As proof, emails were sent in 2019 from Google employee Lawrence Koh, the prior director of games business growth for Google Play, that Activision-Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick was unhappy with the 30% revenue cut.
Epic lawyers also presented the jury with new information that internal predictions allegedly showed Google Play may take a massive loss of $2.5 billion against its margins from 2019 to 2022 if key developers ceased to work with the tech giant.
During Google’s cross-examination, Koh denied Epic’s argument, saying he had “never” paid off a developer to prohibit it from starting its own app store and that the money paid out was intended to guarantee that corporations released their games in Play with the same level of excellence as it did in other markets.
“As we said in 2022, Google never asked us, pressured us, or made us agree not to compete with Google Play,” an Activision spokesperson said.
