Google confirms it offered Epic Games $147 million to launch Fortnite on Play Store

Epic Games said Google feared that game developers like Sony, Nintendo would ditch the Play Store and launch Android games on their own websites, causing the tech giant to lose billions in revenue.

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Epic Games filed the antitrust lawsuit against Google in 2020. (Express Photo)

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During the Google vs Epic trial, Google confirmed it offered Epic Games $147 million to launch Fortnite on the Play Store. The deal, approved by Google’s VP of Play partnership was presented in 2018 and involved paying the video game maker over the total amount over three years.

Google seems to have made the offer to prevent popular game publishers like Blizzard, Netease, Valve and others from bypassing the Google Play Store. However, Epic Games did not accept the deal and launched Fortnite on its website, allowing the video game maker to directly sell V-Bucks and bypass Google’s Play Store commission.

A few months after Epic Games launched Fortnite for Android, the company filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google. Citing internal documents, Epic Games said Google was afraid of a ‘contagion risk’ and said the tech giant attempted to change its decision by offering special benefits.

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The documents said Google had forecasted that all major mobile game developers would leave Play Store a few years after Epic decided to ditch the official Android app market. This might cause the tech giant to lose billions of dollars in revenue. As for Fortnite, Google predicted that the game’s absence from the Play Store would lead to a revenue loss of somewhere between $130 and $250 million. If other game publishers followed Epic’s suit, the tech giant forecasted it could lose another $3.6 billion.

While Google says it was afraid of game developers ditching the Play Store and that the investment was worth the money, Epic Games is using the same documents to prove that Google Play Store has a monopoly over Android app distribution.