Payday devs Starbreeze are working on a co-op multiplayer game based on storied tabletop RPG Dungeons & Dragons. It’ll be out in 2026, and Starbreeze are being upfront with the fact it’ll be a games-as-a-service-type game.
For Google Play, Dominating the Android World Was ‘Existential’
15.11.2023 - 02:59 / tech.hindustantimes.com / Sundar Pichai
Google agreed to pay $8 billion over four years to Samsung Electronics Co. to make its search engine, voice assistant and Play Store the default on the company's mobile devices, according to testimony presented by Epic Games Inc.
James Kolotouros, Vice President for Partnerships at Google, testified Monday under questioning by an Epic lawyer in the San Francisco trial that Google devised plans to share app store revenue with Android mobile device makers to ensure their products were preinstalled with Google Play on home screens.
Epic, the maker of the popular Fortnite game, alleges the technology giant's app marketplace violates antitrust laws. A lawyer for Epic presented the agreement with Samsung as an example of the deals Google made starting four years ago with mobile phone manufacturers that use the Android operating system. Kolotouros' testimony revealed that Samsung devices account for half or more of Google Play revenue.
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Epic is seeking to show that executives at the Alphabet Inc. unit were eager to discourage the proliferation of third-party app stores that would cut into Google Play's operating profit — which was estimated by Epic earlier in the trial at more than $12 billion in 2021, from sales that include the standard 30% revenue cut the company took from app developers.
Monday's testimony followed evidence Epic presented last week to show that Google was so concerned about game developers releasing their products independently that it was willing to spend millions to persuade them to stick with Google Play. On Tuesday Epic's lawyers will question Alphabet Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai.
Google has long struck similar deals to maintain its search engine as the preselected choice on mobile devices — agreements that are at the center of a separate antitrust showdown with the Justice Department at a trial going in Washington.
Epic's lawyer Lauren Moskowitz pulled up a 2019 Google internal presentation on “Project Banyan,” an initiative that involved investing funds so the Google Play Store could stand its ground against Samsung's Galaxy App Store. The first slide said: “Existential Question — How do we continue to keep Play as the preeminent distribution platform for Android?”
In 2019, Google offered to pay Samsung $200 million over four years so that Samsung's Galaxy Store app marketplace would be available within the Google Play store rather than preinstalled and the South Korean device maker would not offer its own payment or billing system. But that proposal was abandoned and Google went on to sign three deals with Samsung the next year worth $8 billion over four years.
One internal document showed Google saved almost $1 billion over four years
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