Google promised Activision Blizzard $360 million over three years period To Block Rival App Store
According to a court document filed on Thursday, Google has made at least 24 agreements with significant game companies to prevent them from launching rival stores to the Play Store. This includes a pact to pay Activision Blizzard over $360 million over the course of three years. The paper also states Google’s agreement to give Riot Games, the company that created the well-known “League of Legends,” about $30 million over the course of a year.
According to documents, Google and Activision agreed to a $360 million contract in January to prevent Activision’s competing app store from operating. According to the agreement’s plans, Epic Games will sue Activision for engaging in anticompetitive behavior. In their continuous conflict, Google and Apple accuse one another of unfairly pushing their own goods down consumers’ throats by taking advantage of the other’s market supremacy.
Any claims of a trade settlement made by Google in a recent legal filing are denied by Activision. “Google never asked us, pressured us, or made us agree not to compete with Google Play,” Activision said. “Epic’s allegations are nonsense.” The company called the allegations “nonsense” in a statement released to GamesBeat. They are still examining the filing as of Riot. Epic lost a similar lawsuit against Apple’s app store last year. The dispute started when Apple began charging 30% for Fortnite’s in-app purchases. In that case, an appellate decision is anticipated the following year.
It was mentioned in an earlier version of the lawsuit without the same language that Google’s partnerships with significant game creators are a part of their internal effort known as “Project Hug.” Recently, Epic Games launched a lawsuit against Google, accusing them of engaging in monopolistic behavior. According to Epic’s lawsuit, some of these contracts “were intended to, and did, prevent developers from opening alternative app shops, which is a per se violation of the antitrust statutes.” Other agreements had the unlawful intention of preventing developers from making Android apps and other original material available outside of Google Play, and they really did.
In January 2020, not long after Activision informed Google that they were thinking about opening their own app store, a deal was reached between Google and Activision. According to court documents, Google’s collaboration with Riot was also meant to “halt their internal ‘app store’ initiatives.” ‘ 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) would abandon its ambitions to build a competing app store.” The lawsuit also claimed that the pact drives up costs while lowering service quality.