The Case of Epic and Google: A State and Territory Judge Judges’ View on Apple’s Decay into a Game and a Digital App Store

Wilson White said that the trial made clear that we compete fiercely with Apple and its App Store, as well as app stores onAndroid devices and gaming consoles. You can read theirfull statement further down.

Two years ago, a similar case did not go well for Epic. A federal judge in Oakland California ordered Apple to make a single change to its practices within the next 90 days. The judge found that most of the other Apple practices were justified because it was necessary for the maker to recover its investment in the app marketplace. Apple has not had to comply even though the Supreme Court is expected to decide early in the new year whether to review the case.

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.

As an employee of Epic, I’ve not been able to see Google’s internal documents until the trial started. The lawyers can see them, but I saw almost all the key elements in this case at the same time the jury saw them. Two things stand out big time. Google’s Project Hug was an astonishingly corrupt effort at a massive scale — the same corrupt deal structure they tried to do with Epic when they wanted to pay us off to launch Fortnite on Google Play and not launch our own store.

The case began in 2020 with a claim from Unreal Games, a company famous for its blockbuster game and tools for developers. 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.

According to it, its sole aim was to provide a safe and attractive experience to users, as well as facing competition from Apple, its iPhone, and its App Store.

It is possible that the US district judge in Washington, DC, will issue a ruling in the summer of 204 on whether or not they think that the internet search company has violated the law by maintaining its monopoly. TheTestimony in that case, brought by the US Department of Justice and attorneys general from every US state and territory, concluded last month.

At the conclusion of the trial that concluded today, no one knows why it took a jury rather than a judge to decide the fate of the company.

As many as 48,000 app developers were previously settled with Google, but no changes were made to its business practices. It also reached a settlement with a group of attorneys general. Details of the latter settlement had not been published, pending the verdict in the Epic trial.

It is in evidence. This was my one that I mentioned. Right before Christmas-ish 2019, we were planning to launch the new Marvel season with a bunch of Star Wars content and its awesome lineup. I asked Google’s executives to let Fortnite come to the Google Play Store using our own payment method and to open up, you know, using their own payment methods to all developers, not just Epic. That was our proposal.

Instead of paying 30 percent of the cost of their payment from Google, Spotify pays 4 percent of the cost. That’s what the rate should be! The rate is reasonable for an unbundled system.

If you paid 0 percent or 4 percent to use your own payments system, you would be here today. Would you have fought this lawsuit to begin with if they’d simply offered something more fair to you?

In the year 2019, we submitted a proposal to the search engine. 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, so we wouldn’t have had a dispute.

It’s always been in Google’s power to solve this problem. They make several billion dollars a year in profits that are unfairly earned from the tax, which is nothing compared to the hundreds of millions of dollars they make from search. For all the other benefits they get from Android, Google could solve this problem today if they wanted to.

I don’t know about Supercell, but we know from the documents that Riot was planning to distribute League of Legend directly through their website on mobile, exactly as they do on PC. Until they were paid off, they planned to do that. Riot was dissuaded from distributing off Google Play because of the payoff from Google.

They came to us and said they were doing that. And we know it because after all that went down, I talked to an Activision employee who was close to that effort, working with the team building the store, and he reported that the entire store team Activision had employed to build their competing store had been disbanded as soon as Activision signed their deal with Google.

One of the talking points Microsoft had for the European Union was the fact that the merger strengthened the company overall and made it easier for it to sell products on mobile devices.

Apple’s antitrust tricks are internal to the company. They force developers to have the same terms, and they force carriers and OEMs to have the same terms as well.

It was interesting to discover that because of the open source nature of the Android operating system, all deals were put out in the open. More out in the open, I should say — certainly they still wanted to

keep them secret

.

I will show you the emails from the Apple trial and show how the deals they were involved in were also self-serving.

The thing that is disappointing me the most is that Microsoft was awesome at the peak of the antitrust trial against them. Microsoft has always been great to developers and respectful, treating them like partners, you know? Even though Microsoft was crushing corporate competitors, the developer experience was excellent. [Editor’s note: Netscape might feel differently.]

This is the philosophy we take with Unreal Engine and the games store. We want to help other companies succeed like we do. I think that philosophy will 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.

If you’re able to put your own store on the phone, do you think it will be an app store or a game store? We see a store we could both go to, but they decided to focus 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 own the Brave web browser, we have a number of creation tools, including Unreal Engine, and there’s more to come. We will host any app anyone is interested in.

The gaming market is something we are uniquely close to and so I think we would be able to forge closer partnerships and opportunities in gaming, but we would open to everyone on PC as well.

Tim Sweeney on Epic’s victory royale over Google: the Apple case and the Court of First-Trial in Google vs. Google

Abner Li at 9to5google had access to a biased summary of the email. Don Harrison testified at trial that he didn’t think Google leaked to the press. He was shown a document with a summary of the articles that appeared following the leak of our plans to the press.

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 isn’t a legal connection between the two. The decision of the humans involved in the appeal comes from the justices and the support teams.

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

What Happened in Apple’s Silicon Valley, aka Tech Antitrust, That Apple wasn’t Supposed to Happen on a Day

You’d see long conversation threads would start to get into a spicy antitrust issue, and suddenly somebody points out the history’s on and the chat goes silent. They just turned it off to have the documents destroyed. It was great to see that all called out in detail.

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. It was really, really interesting to see that my understandings of what Google was doing behind the scenes were actually true — you’re leaking our conversations to reporters to get negative stories written about us; you’re paying other developers off to convince them not to launch their own stores; they were going around and paying carriers and OEMs secretly not to carry competing stores.

You are with us and we want to thank you. 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. So my first question is why, if you attended the trial every day, save one, then 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. So I had to do that. I believe it is necessary to show respect for the legal process by sitting through the entire trial of Apple.

Something that we’d suspected all along was the jury was really following the case carefully. They weren’t snoozing off as you might expect with the complexity of these documents and things — everybody was paying attention, they’re looking at the question asker and the witness and taking notes and reading documents. The justice system worked even with a complex tech antitrust case that you can’t try on a jury.

It is a good day for developers to see that the Sherman Antitrust Act is working in the new era of tech monopolies, and has not had a big antitrust judgement against a tech company since the 1990s. Back in the early days of the internet. This is an amazing thing and it is crucial for the industry which is being strangled by a number of people imposing huge amounts of control and taxes which not only make a lot of things unviable but that also raise prices for consumers.

I understand the significance, but… you were there in person. You clapped Bornstein on the back as you shook the Google attorney’s hand. How did you feel in that moment?

It was good to have some relief. It was great to see that the verdict was good for the clients and that there was a lot of apprehension going on, but it was good to see.

They got it, they got it quickly, and they were able to pull apart what was going on and contrast it with the fiction of the story that Google was trying to tell.

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

The American Microsoft v. Epic Antitrust Trial: Why We’re Here, and What We Can Do to [Remove] if We Don’t

I think it was a complete whitewash. There was one cell that was missing in the entire board. I was really impressed — the thing for that bingo card that really impressed me was “lick the cookie.” Do you remember? You don’t even have to be old to participate in the 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. This is a worldwide verdict and we have it here in the United States. We didn’t have a market in China. So any remedies, we would presume, would be worldwide. In Australia and the UK, we have cases that are related to Epic and Apple.

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?

Oh, yeah, no. Match has been an awesome partner and a fellow member of the Coalition for App Fairness. They needed to get something for their business, and I hope they got that out of their 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 what happens. Not directly, anyway. We have a big strategy for building 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.

But we’ve gotten so much traction with Fortnite in so many different ways, and with the Epic Games Store, right, we’re going to continue investing heavily here. The Epic Games Store is the untold success story in the background. Since it launched, we have 80 million monthly active users. We are catching them fast because of the amount of steam (120 million). 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 a few more programmers. The Linux problem is the problem. The hardware of the steam deck is awesome. Valve has done an amazing job there; I wish they would get to tens of millions of users, at which point it would actually make sense to support it.