A recap of Epic Games vs. Google trial day one
The first day of the Epic Games vs. Google antitrust trial ended after both sides gave opening statements and two witnesses testified.
One thing that is clear already is that we’re going to get a bunch of insights into how the game and tech industries work behind the scenes.
Sean Hollister of the Verge has done a great job liveblogging the first day of the trial. He noted that Epic CEO Tim Sweeney was sitting in the courtroom at the outset, but he didn’t have anything to say but “the weather is nice.”
Epic’s lead attorney Gary Bornstein opened with a chart that showed the Google Play Store accounted for 90% of app installs in the year the lawsuit was filed, 2020, despite the fact that Google “will say” that the Samsung app store is installed on 60% of all Android smartphones. But Bornstein noted that a tiny sliver of the market share belongs to Samsung.
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Bornstein argued that Google pays actual and potential competitors not to compete and gives them money and other things of value. Bornstein says this is anti-competitive.
Epic also said it knows that Google will argue that it allows “sideloading” of apps, where users can use a browser to install apps as an alternative to using the Google Play Store. But Epic Games said Google through hoops in the way of users who were considering sideloading. Epic said that Google’s 30% fee for its app store sales amount to $12 billion a year and carry a 70% profit margin, compared to 24% in 2014.
Bornstein said that Google’s codename for shady deals was Project Hug, where Google
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