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It has been a few years since the whole saga of Epic pulling Fortnite from the Google Play Store and Apple App Store, and thanks to court documents in the ongoing antitrust case of Google vs Epic Games, it has been revealed that Google had offered the company a ton of money to keep Fortnite in the Play Store.
According to the documents, it seems that Google offered Epic $147 million for them to keep Fortnite in their app store. This money would have been dispensed over a three year period ending in 2021, and it was done to prevent a “contagion” of popular apps following in Epic’s footsteps by pulling their apps out of the Play Store in favor of their own distribution platform or a third-party distribution platform.
Based on Google’s projections, the company had estimated that should Fortnite leave the Play Store, it could cost them $130-$250 million in terms of lost revenue from in-game purchases, but if other developers and publishers were to leave, that number could swell up to $3.6 billion. This meant that offering Epic $147 million was a small price to pay in the grand scheme of things.
Epic has of course turned down the deal which is where we are today with the lawsuit. Epic and other developers have expressed their dissatisfaction with how companies like Apple and Google are taking such a big cut of app and in-app purchases. This is why some companies have removed the option of making purchases directly within their app, instead directing customers to their website as this would allow them to circumvent having to give Google or Apple a cut of the sales.
Source: The Verge
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