Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, Nov. 9-Google confirmed to the court that Epic had received a $147 million deal to put its popular game "Fortnite" on the Google Play store.

Purnima Kochikar, vice president of Google Play Partners, said the agreement had been approved and submitted to Epic, but was not accepted.

Tu Yuan Pexels will receive the money in stages under the three-year "incremental funding" program, which runs to 2021. The agreement is designed to prevent popular apps from bypassing Google.

In fact, Epic offered the Android version of "Fortnite" directly through its website in 2018, avoiding the Play store and eliminating the need to pay Google the commission required for the Play store. In an antitrust lawsuit filed in late 2020, Epic said its decision panicked Google for a time.

It quoted internal documents as saying that Google was concerned that this approach might be "contagious", meaning that other game developers, including Blizzard, Valve, Sony and Nintendo, would follow Epic's example.

Epic also claims that Google is trying to prevent this from happening by offering special benefits or even buying Epic.

Lawrence Koh, the outgoing head of Google's Play gaming business development, testified on Tuesday that the "contagious" documents had been submitted to the court.

Google believes that almost all head game developers are considering withdrawing from the Play store after seeing Epic's move, which could cost Google billions of dollars in revenue.

Court documents predict that if "Fortnite" leads to a large-scale "withdrawal", it could lead to a direct revenue loss of $130m to 250m (CTOnews.com Note: currently about RMB946-1.82 billion) and indirect losses of as much as $3.6 billion (currently about Rmb26.208 billion).

Google said it was only worried about the loss of games on the Play store, which meant no harm. "We just want developers to choose Play," Koh said. "We think it's worth investing in games on this service."

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