Epic v. Google: everything we learned in Fortnite court
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Phil Harrison, July 15th, 2018, “Strategic Rationale”:
I‘ve taken a stab at a high-level strategic rationale for an investment in Epic.
Fortnite is (or can be) the leading business driver for Google across:
YouTube (already 100M+ increase in game watch time MAU)
GCP (to shift 130M+ players from AWS and build an anchor tenant in games)
Yeti (Fortnite + Unreal Engine support for all games)
[email continues]
July 16th, 2018, in a reply from Dave Sobota:
As a potential alternative, Phil is proposing we consider approaching Tencent to either (a) buy Epic shares from Tencent to get more control over Epic (unclear how that helps us without a majority share) or (b) join up with Tencent to buy 100% of Epic (and then of course we do a lot of deep commercial things with Epic).
The direct investment route had Google internally proposing to invest ~$2B in exchange for a ~20 percent stake of Epic. Google wrote: “Will require a substantial investment to gain influence.”
The Tencent / controlling interest route sounded very tentative:
The company may be open to a second large strategic investor as a counterweight to Tencent
Tencent may not be willing to sell shares, or may seek to block another strategic investor (investor rights unknown)
Update: Fixed typo and added a line about “Yeti” that I missed copying over.
