Epic v. Google: everything we learned in Fortnite court
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Google’s lawyer just pointed out that Amazon spent $1.4 billion on its Appstore over seven years, and yet, Barnes found Google spent $2.4 billion in a single year.
It sounds impressive, but it’s also not quite relevant to what Barnes found. “I see what you put on the slide, but you haven’t compared it to revenue,” he said, nodding to the fact that it doesn’t speak to Google’s profit margin at all.
And now we’re in virgin territory: we’re seeing an “Alternative Profit Calculation” where Google Play would have lost money from 2011 through 2017 if it charged just a 12 percent revenue share — roughly $3 billion in aggregate before turning profits in 2018 and beyond — assuming Google still spent as much as it did and everything else stayed the same. Barnes is visibly skeptical it would.
“That’s just math, that’s not proper financial analysis,” says Barnes.
