With this move, it could have stopped the situation regarding Fortnite, Epic Games and the Google Play Store.

The Epic Games-Apple lawsuit is bringing up more and more documents, and now, The Verge found a court filing, in which Google considered buying either a part of Epic Games or all of it. And suppose Google became the majority owner of the Tim Sweeney-led company (known for the Unreal Engine, too). In that case, they could have forced them to stop sidestepping the Google Play Store and the 30% commission on microtransactions (which is what Epic Games avoided, leading to them getting the boot).

Epic revealed that Google offered it a „special deal” to launch the game on the Google Play Store. and it allegedly got contacted by a Google Play manager who admitted that sideloading the app was a complicated process. „Staff members have acknowledged internally that the difficulty Google imposes on consumers who wish to direct download leads to a ‘[p]oor user experience,’ in that there are ‘15+ steps to get app [via sideloading] versus two steps with Play or on iOS,” Epic said.

Epic also cited an internal Google document, which called the company a contagion: „Not content with the contractual and technical barriers it has carefully constructed to eliminate competition, Google uses its size, influence, power, and money to induce third parties into anticompetitive agreements that further entrench its monopolies. For example, Google has gone so far as to share its monopoly profits with business partners to secure their agreement to fence out the competition, has developed a series of internal projects to address the “contagion” it perceived from efforts by Epic and others to offer consumers and developers competitive alternatives and has even contemplated buying some or all of Epic to squelch this threat.”

Tim Sweeney, the head of Epic, responded on Twitter, admitting that this Google move was new to them: „This was unbeknownst to us at the time, and because of the court’s protective order we’re just finding out now about Google’s consideration of buying Epic to shut down our efforts to compete with Google Play. Whether this would have been a negotiation to buy Epic or some hostile takeover attempt is unclear. Here Google also talks about the “frankly abysmal” sideloading experience they created, all while touting Android publicly as an “open platform”.”

Whatever the ruling will be between Epic Games and Apple, it will shock the industry.

Source: WCCFTech