Google is accused of bribing game developers
A specific case mentioned is the case where Google made an agreement to pay game developer Activision Blizzard $ 360 million (about 8,900 billion VND) over three years.
Google allegedly agreed to pay Activision $360 million over three years to keep the app’s developer from competing with the Play Store.
The deal between Google and Activision comes after Activision allegedly revealed to Google that it was starting to build its own app store. The information was discovered in the filing of an unresolved lawsuit filed by Fortnite developer Epic Games in 2020.
Epic stated that Google knew with certainty that paying Activision an amount would “effectively ensure that Activision would abandon its plans to launch an app store that would compete with the Play Store”. Epic also believes that the agreement between Activision and Google will reduce the quality of service in the Play Store.
Court records also show that Google paid Riot Games of Tencent Holdings Ltd. of China for 30 million USD (about 744 billion VND) over a period of one year to prevent this game company from competing with the Play Store. Epic’s lawsuit two years ago accused Google of using anti-competitive behavior to run the Play Store.
Google removed Fortnite from its Android app store in 2018 after Epic violated Google’s policy by including a link to its own in-app payment platform. This is the game developer’s attempt to bypass Google’s payment platform that generates up to 30% of in-app revenue.
Epic’s goal is to allege that payments made by Google to game developers are to prevent competition when it comes to Android app distribution. Google denies this and says that paying developers is a way to maintain healthy competition. The payments are part of a plan known internally at Google as “Project Hug”. Google adds that some of the developer payments are payments for YouTube posts and Google’s cloud services and advertising platforms.
(According to VOV)
