10 things to know from Epic CEO Tim Sweeney's testimony at the Google antitrust trial

tech.hindustantimes.com:

The Google antitrust lawsuit, based on filings by Fortnite publisher Epic Games has completed nine days, and in this time we have seen some big revelations being made. Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed that the company pays Apple up to 18 billion dollars a year for the default iPhone search position, and Google's partnerships boss Don Harrison said that Spotify pays zero percent when users decide to use Spotify's payment system, and between 6 to 10 percent when it is made through Google's channels. On day nine, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney was sworn in for testimony. These were the ten big revelations to come from it.

1. Highlighting his background, Sweeney says, “I built the very first version of the Unreal Engine myself between 1995 and 1998”. He also adds, “I wrote about a quarter of a million lines of computer code in three and a half years”.

2. Sweeney reveals that the initial plan for Epic was to launch Fortnite directly on the Google Play Store.

3. Sweeney revealed that Samsung offered the company a special deal for distributing Fortnite on its Galaxy Store. Instead of the usual 30 percent revenue share (that Google was asking for), Samsung agreed to charge Epic just 12 percent. Sweeney also explained that the two-step download process (Fortnite Launcher, then Fortnite) was necessary to ensure that users could always download the latest version of the game without having to re-download the entire game file.

4. Sweeney mentioned that he initially decided to skip Google Play and distribute Fortnite directly through the Epic Games website. However, he later realized that this decision was deterring many users from installing the game. As a result, Epic decided to submit Fortnite to Google Play again, but this time with Epic's