As per a recent court filing in the US, Alphabet’s Google has reached at least 24 agreements with significant app developers to stop them from making a rivaling app store for its Play Store, including a contract to pay Activision Blizzard Inc. roughly $360 million in a span of 3 years.
According to the document, Google also committed to pay Riot Games, the company that creates “League of Legends,” around $30 million over the course of a year beginning in 2020.
The financial information was revealed in a recently released, unedited version of a lawsuit Epic Games, the creator of “Fortnite,” first brought against Google in 2020. It accused the search engine giant of engaging in anticompetitive behavior in its Android and Play Store operations.
According to Google, the complaint is unfounded and full of false statements. It said that its agreements with developers reflect healthy competition. Riot claimed to be studying the filing. A similar lawsuit Epic brought against Apple Inc., the other major app store supplier, last year was largely unsuccessful. Next year, an appellate decision in that case is anticipated.
The agreements that Google has with developers are a part of an internal initiative called “Project Hug,” and they were mentioned in prior iterations of the complaint without being specified in detail. The compensation consists of cash for YouTube uploads as well as credits for Google adverts and cloud services.
Soon after Activision informed Google that it was thinking about opening its own app store, the arrangement with Activision was made public in January 2020. Working with Riot was also intended to “halt their internal ‘app store’ efforts,” according to court documents.
At the time, Google predicted that if developers switched to rival platforms, the app store would lose billions of dollars in sales.
According to the lawsuit by Epic, Google was aware that partnering with Activision “essentially assured that (Activision) will vacate its ambitions to build a competing app store.” The lawsuit also claimed that the arrangement reduces service quality while raising pricing. According to the court documents, game developers Nintendo Co. and Ubisoft Entertainment SA, the meditation software Calm, and the provider of educational apps Age of Learning were among those who had agreements up until July with Google.
