Sean Hollister

Let’s give it a go! The first page we’re seeing shows all the different features Google Play Billing offers from “Setup” to “Retention” to “Insights”:

Page three shows Google Play offers credit / debit card support in 150-plus countries, direct carrier billing in 58 markets with 180-plus carriers, gift cards at 950,000 locations in 32 countries, and offers PayPal in 20-plus countries, and there’s a map that shows Google offers UPI in India, as well as E-Wallets and Mobile Money in some places.

What does that mean?

Loew says that Google serves its developers and its users.

“Are Google Play Store and Google Play Billing separate products?” Another question that the jury will explicitly decide, according to the tentative jury instructions (pdf) the court submitted last night.

“No they are not,” she says.

OCV did — and received help from Google.

But we didn’t see evidence OCV any help that a normal app developer wouldn’t get. OCV’s CTO testified that he didn’t get any special benefit or service for his testimony, wasn’t told anything about the case when it asked him to testify, and doesn’t own any Google stock personally (not that it was alleged he did).

He said earlier that OCV primarily builds website for clients in the law enforcement and public safety sectors — police, fire, public health, clerk of courts.

One of OCV’s apps is HCPH Overdose Rescue, we just saw — it’s an app that explains how to administer Narcan.

Epic is countering by asking Beaty whether OCV could have decided just to make apps for Android users instead of also building them for iOS (presumably to show Android and iOS don’t compete for the same users).

It “wasn’t really a consideration for us because we wanted the widest reach possible,” he says.

During a jury recess, the judge noted that Epic didn’t seem to be challenging the amount of damages Google’s expert calculated, beyond the payment processing fee. Perhaps the jury won’t need to decide an amount because Epic will simply concede a few hundred thousand dollars to Google.

That’s likely peanuts for Epic, at least compared to Epic’s legal fees for this trial.

There was also a suggestion we might wrap up early today.

Tilting Point suggests its revenues skyrocketed after adopting a strategy of helping developers publish on the Play Store, quadrupling from under $50M in 2019 to over $200M two years later.

But Epic is pouncing on that, in a line of questioning designed to make Burak look biased — Epic gets Burak to agree that the revenue stream from Google is critical to his business, and points out how Tilting Point is in the business of brokering developer relationships with Google and how Tilting Point needs to maintain a strong relationship with Google itself to do so.

Burak says “correct” in response to each of Epic’s questions and agrees that Google asked him to testify today. I would think the jury knows by now that every witness has been called by one side or the other, but hey.

He says that in general, the lifetime value of a user (LTV) on the Google Play Store is much higher than on, say, a Samsung store, but is implying that it’s not just because of Google’s market share.

Google “provides tools for me to understand how effectively I’m doing it and how effectively they convert to install the apps, the games, and how effectively I can convert them after on to be payers,” he says.

The tools help him help developers compare performance to the leading apps (anonymously) in each game genre on the store and “fine-tune” the “stream of players.”

(Basically, when Epic launched its game on the Google Play Store and bypassed Google’s payment system, it breached its contract, and anybody who bought V-Bucks from Epic using Epic’s Direct Pay system didn’t pay Google’s fee.)

Leonard has a doctorate from MIT in economics but says the calculation is pretty simple:

Epic received $1,329,770 in revenue through Direct Pay (during the short period that the hotfix was live)

Google had a 30 percent service fee

So Google lost $398,931, he concludes.

The only thing Epic asked him to clarify was whether he subtracted the transaction fees from that amount — and if he was aware Epic paid Google $3.3 million during the same period. It’s not clear where the $3.3 million number came from.

Has Epic even considered paying for preinstallation?

“I couldn’t answer the question.”

And yet, he agrees that Epic paid developers hundreds of millions of dollars to make their games exclusive to the Epic Games Store on PC.

“Is there anything wrong in your view with Epic paying hundreds of millions of dollars to developers to get them to launch exclusively in the Epic Games Store?”

He says no.

Gelber replies:

How is the cost structure different?

There are “multiple competitors on console,” he says.