Epic v. Google: everything we learned in Fortnite court
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We’re now hearing a taped deposition of Epic CFO Randy Gelber from September 2022, and we’re hearing an interesting question indeed — one that cuts both ways if you’ve been following each party’s narrative so far.
Gelber replies:
We believe those to be competitive markets and we believe that the fee, their cost structure, is entirely different than a mobile app store.
How is the cost structure different?
Well, they subsidize hardware, so they sell their hardware, as far as I can tell from widely published reports, at a loss, and so the fee needs to cover that. Mobile apps are typically low in size and so their costs are higher, and I think their customer service costs are higher because people don’t call Google about apps, they call the developer generally...
There are “multiple competitors on console,” he says.
