By Emegwoako C. Paschal
According to a court filing on Thursday, Nov 18th, Alphabet’s Google has struck at least 24 deals with major app developers to prevent them from competing with its Play Store, including an agreement to pay Activision Blizzard $360 million (roughly Rs. 2,941 crore) over three years.
According to the filing, Google has also agreed to pay Tencent Holdings’ Riot Games unit, which produces League of Legends, $30 million (roughly Rs. 245 crore) over a one-year period in 2020.
The financial information was revealed in a newly unredacted copy of a lawsuit Epic Games filed against Google in 2020. It accused Google of anticompetitive behavior in its Android and Play Store businesses.
Google has called the lawsuit unfounded and full of inaccuracies. It claims that its deals to keep developers happy reflect healthy competition.
Riot stated that it is reviewing the filing. Requests for comment were not returned by Activision.
Epic largely lost a similar case against Apple, the other major app store provider, last year. In that case, an appellate decision is expected next year.
The Google agreements with developers are part of an internal effort known as “Project Hug,” and they were described in earlier versions of the lawsuit but not in detail.
Payments for YouTube uploads are included, as are credits for Google ads and cloud services.
The agreement with Activision was announced in January 2020, shortly after the company informed Google that it was considering launching its own app store. According to court documents, partnering with Riot was also intended to “stop their in-house ‘app store’ efforts.”
Google predicted billions of dollars in lost app store sales if developers switched to alternative systems at the time.
According to Epic’s lawsuit, Google knew that signing with Activision “effectively guaranteed that (Activision) would abandon its plans to launch a competing app store.” According to the lawsuit, the agreement raises prices while decreasing service quality.
According to the court documents, among those who signed with Google as of July were gamemakers Nintendo and Ubisoft Entertainment, meditation app Calm, and education app company Age of Learning.
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