Google shows epics price cut took a while to influence a competitor too microsoft

Epic v. Google: everything we learned in Fortnite court

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Posted Dec 1, 2023 at 9:50 PM UTC

Google claims Epic’s price cut took a while to influence a competitor, too: Microsoft.

Epic has made some hay out of the idea that Google took 18 months to match Apple’s subscription price cut, but Google’s lawyer just called out Bernheim for that — because while the Epic Games Store launched with a 12 percent service fee in December 2018, Microsoft didn’t match that with its PC games store until mid 2021.

(Epic has since come back to point out that the Epic Games Store launched with no traction, and would have taken a while to gain some — and that Microsoft did move from 70/30 to 85/15 in 2019. So maybe it influenced Microsoft right away?)

Google hasn’t gotten a lot of points on Bernheim IMO, but it did just seem to nail him for comparing what he calculated as Google Play’s average service fee (26 percent) to ranges of fees (such as 13 percent to 23 percent for the Galaxy Store) in his slide.

Google suggested he should have pointed out that Google’s range was 4 percent to 30 percent, which I have to admit seems right! Bernheim wore it well, saying the comparison was appropriate because Play’s average fee was higher than the top of the other ranges, but he seemed to know he got got on that one.

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