Companies like Apple and Google make a lot of money from their app stores. This is because they take about a 30% cut from all app sales, including in-app purchases, and with games like Fortnite that have a lot of microtransactions, this adds up to a lot of money. So as you can imagine, when Epic decided that they might step out on their own, Google wasn’t too thrilled.So much so that the company thought that maybe buying Epic might be a better idea than letting them go. This is according to unsealed court filings in which Google felt “threatened” by Epic’s plans to distribute Fortnite through other channels that they felt that buying them out would be one way to deal with it.
According to Epic’s description of the situation, “Google has gone so far as to share its monopoly profits with business partners to secure their agreement to fence out 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.”
Now, obviously this did not come to pass but it’s interesting to note that this was a potential strategy that Google had considered. We’re not sure if Epic would have even agreed to a potential sale, but like we said, it’s interesting.
Filed in . Read more about Epic and Google. Source: theverge