Activision Blizzard had a plan — or ploy — to launch its own Android game store
By Sean Hollister, a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
Until today, we’d never heard of “Project Boston”. It was Activision Blizzard King’s big plan to earn more money from its mobile games by changing its relationship with Google. And if things had gone differently, it would have given Activision Blizzard its own app store on Android.
In late 2019, according to internal emails and documents I saw today in the courtroom during the Epic v. Google trial, the company decided it was going to dual-track two intriguing parallel plans.
The first plan was to build its own mobile game store — either in partnership with Epic Games and Clash of Clans publisher Supercell or all by itself — to bypass the Google Play Store. You’d download it from a website, sideload it onto your Android phone, and then you’d be able to purchase, download, and patch games like Candy Crush, Call of Duty Mobile, and Diablo Immortal there.
In private emails with Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, Activision Blizzard CFO Armin Zerza pitched it as the “Steam of Mobile” — a single place to buy mobile games, with a single payment system. Documents suggest the store would charge a transaction fee of 10 to 12 percent, lower than the 30 percent fee Google (and Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and Steam) impose on gaming transactions.
The future of Google’s app store is at stakein a lawsuit by Fortnite publisher Epic Games. Epic sued Google in 2020 after a fight over in-app purchase fees, claiming the Android operating system’s Google Play Store constituted an unlawful monopoly — while Google says its demands would damage Android’s ability to offer a secure user
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