Twitter, Apple, and Google: What Happened to Epic Games? And How Google Decided to Discard the App Store Monopole in 2020
In a post on its company blog, Epic Games said, “Today’s verdict is a win for all app developers and consumers around the world. It proves that the practices of the app store are illegal and they use their power to extract high fees and stifle competition.
A lot has changed since your lawsuit was filed three years ago. For a bit there,
it seemed
like Epic had an interest in expanding outside of games with acquisitions like Houseparty and Bandcamp. What changed? And did app store restrictions play into that at all?
Judge Donato has already stated that he will not grant Epic’s additional request for an anti-circumvention provision “just to be sure Google can’t reintroduce the same problems through some alternative creative solution,” as Epic lead attorney Gary Bornstein put it on November 28th.
Sweeney is the controlling shareholder of the company. He’s the one behind these lawsuits, and it was his idea to challenge these companies in court. It’s been his fight from the very beginning, and he watched almost the entire trial in person from the best seat in the house — with a clear view of the jury, the judge, each witness, and the faces of Google’s lawyers.
The jury made their decision after hearing arguments from both sides over the past few months in a case first filed in 2020. The jury of nine—a 10th juror dropped out early in the trial—deliberated for three hours before reaching its verdict. They faced 11 questions such as defining product and geographic markets and whether Google engaged in anticompetitive conduct in those areas.
The goal of the company was to provide a safe and attractive experience to its users as it faced competition from Apple and the 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 that case, which was brought by the US Department of Justice and attorneys general for nearly every US state and territory, concluded last month.
Google hasn’t said much about why it chose to have a jury rather than a judge decide its fate in the trial that concluded today, though it tried unsuccessfully to reverse course on the eve of jury selection.
Whereas Google, to achieve things with Android, they were going around and paying off game developers, dozens of game developers, to not compete. And they’re paying off dozens of carriers and OEMs to not compete — and when all of these different companies do deals together, lots of people put things in writing, and it’s right there for everybody to read and to see plainly.
And when we tried to bundle Fortnite with other smartphone manufacturers like OnePlus and carriers of all sorts, they told us they couldn’t do a deal because Google had done a secret deal with them.
Instead of paying 30 percent of the total cost to use the payment service, users of the service pay 4% of the total cost. That’s what the rate should be! Four percent is a perfectly reasonable rate for an unbundled payment system.
If you don’t mind paying a small fee for your own payments system or a small fee for Google Play billing, would you be here today? Would you have fought this lawsuit to begin with if they’d simply offered something more fair to you?
That is the proposal we made to the search engine in 2019. If Google had said yes to that, that would have been awesome for all developers — the Android ecosystem would have become much, much stronger, and Google would be in a much better position in the smartphone industry than they are today. The problem would have been solved and there wouldn’t be a dispute.
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 would be able to solve this problem today thanks to the benefits of Android.
The documents that we have seen so far show that Riot was going to distribute League of Legends directly on their website, on mobile, exactly as they do on PC. And that’s what they planned to do until Google paid them off to not do that. Riot decided to not distribute off of Google Play due to the payoff by the tech giant.
They came to us and said they were doing that. After all that happened, I talked to an employee in the team that was working on the store, and he said that the entire store team had been dissolved as soon as they signed the agreement with Activision.
Microsoft spoke to the European Union about how much the merger of Microsoft and Activision strengthened the company in order to provide a viable computing store on both Apple’s andAndroid’s devices.
The thing with Apple is all of their antitrust trickery is internal to the company. They force developers to have the same terms, they force makers to have the same terms, and they force carriers to have the same terms.
It’s interesting to me that because Google distributes the Android operating system as open source, they had to put all these deals out in the open. More out in the open, I should say — certainly they still wanted to
keep them secret
.
I will be detailing my story of the best emails from the Apple trial, as well as the many documents from both companies that show they were self-serving.
I’d say this is the thing that’s disappointed me the 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 was great even as Microsoft was beating their 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 want to be partners that help other companies succeed. And I think philosophy change… perhaps it will only come with a generational change in the company’s management. I think the philosophy change would do both of those companies much good.
Do you think that a game store only would be available on the device, or would it be an app store? We see a store that could be both, but Valve has decided to focus on games.
So the Epic Games Store isn’t a games store, right? The store is operated by the video game company, Epic Games. So we have a lot of non-games there already. We have the Brave web browser, we have a number of software creation tools including Unreal Engine, and there’s more coming, including some other awesome creation tools and productivity tools. We’ll host any app anybody wants of any sort.
I think the gaming market is something we’re uniquely close to, and so I think we would likely be able to forge closer partnerships and opportunities in gaming, but we’ll be open to everybody on Android as we are on PC.
Tim Sweeney on Epic’s victory royale over Google: Does the Apple case help the appeal to the courts? A commentary on the Google email scandal
They leaked their summary of the email to Abner Li at 9to5Google, which was ridiculously biased. Don Harrison testified at trial that he didn’t think Google leaked to the press. He was presented with a document that had a summary of some of the articles that appeared as a result of the leaking of our plans to the press.
Oh, I think I read that one in court. I didn’t realize 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. Does winning the verdict in this Google case help your appeal with the Apple case in any way?
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 decisions made by the justices and support teams when considering the appeal, really comes down to that.
It was really disconcerting to see the extent of bad faith efforts that were going on in a company of Google’s size. They destroyed all their chats on these topics, despite the fact that they had respectable processes and leadership structures that give a check and balance against wrongdoing.
I used to get called a conspiracy theorist sometimes, because I suspected a lot of the practices that became apparent after we started this. It was fascinating to realize that my understanding of what was happening behind the scenes was correct, and that you are leaking our conversations to reporters in order to get negative stories written about us.
Source: Tim Sweeney on Epic’s victory royale over Google
Tim Sweeney on Epic’s victory royale over Google: Where did you come from? How did you feel the day that Google opened an email?
Thank you for being here with us. It’s been a very engaging trial to watch. I’ve been there every day of the trial, and you’ve been there every day save one. I am wondering why you personally went to this trial every day, and why you didn’t learn what happened on one day.
Yeah, Epic is asking a lot of the court system and the jury here, spending four weeks on a major antitrust trial full of 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 is necessary to show respect for the legal process because Phil and I sat throughout the trial.
So this trial has been four years in the making. There was an email that was in discovery about a plan to draw Google into a legal fight over antitrust. Do you remember how it felt to hear the jury’s decision for Epic?
The Sherman Antitrust Act works in the new era of tech monopolies, which means that change and benefits for everybody have not been experienced since the 1990’s, with the US v Microsoft. The early days of the internet. This is great news for the industry because it is being messed with by a few people who are imposing huge levels of control and taxes on products that are not even viable and making a lot of different products unviable.
I understand, but you were 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 in that moment?
It was a relief. It was awesome to see, because traditional wisdom says that a rapid jury verdict is not good for thePlaintiff making a complicated case and there was some apprehension going on.
They were able to pull apart the events that were going on quickly and contrast them with the storyline that Google was trying to tell.
Source: Tim Sweeney on Epic’s victory royale over Google
“Lick the Cookie”: What Happened in the First Epic Games App Store? The Case for the United States vs. Microsoft Antitrust Trial
I think it was a complete whitewash. I believe that there was one cell missing from the entire board. The bingo card that impressed me the most was the one that had the picture of a 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 are going to start changing the world as quickly as we can. We not only have this verdict here in the United States, it is a worldwide verdict, right? We established a market worldwide, excluding China. So any remedies, we would presume, would be worldwide. There are also cases in Australia, and one in the UK.
It’s not just Epic anymore, there’s a lot of legislators, there’s a lot of regulators, and there’s other litigation all pushing in the direction of openness. And we’re going to do absolutely everything we can.
Do you have anything to say to your former partners in litigation, Match Group, that
abandoned you at the last minute
and may now be regretting it?
Yes, no. Match is an awesome partner and a member of the coalition for app fairness. I hope they got what they needed out of their settlement. Few companies have the resources to fight multinational litigation against two powerful companies. There is no hard feelings, and we are grateful that they joined the case, because they helped 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 us see. No… well, not directly, anyway. Our strategy is to build games and technology. We’ve had huge success in recent years with the Unreal Engine gaining adoption among all kinds of industries even beyond games. We’ve also run into our own financial limitations. You know, we expanded the company to nine times the size we were before Fortnite took off. And so we’re just trying to forge the strategy where we’re living within our means and doing everything we absolutely can.
We were so attracted to the game that we were going to invest a lot more in the store. The success story of the store is behind it. There are currently 80 million monthly active users. 120 million is a lot, so we are catching them fast. Fortnite has more concurrent users right now than all Steam games combined. You should really expect dramatic changes that benefit all developers over the next few years.
If we only had some programmers. The problem is with the Linux operating system. I love the Steam Deck hardware. It would make sense to support it at that point, because Valve has done an amazing job and I wish they would get a lot of users.