Sean Hollister

“I just spent a significant amount of my time and my energy helping launch our game product on Google Play,” he testifies under oath. “I had hoped that we could pursue that option... and this email led to that not being possible.”

Tim Sweeney is watching his testimony with an open mouth. He seems surprised or amused. That’s new: I haven’t seen Tim with an expression on his face any time I’ve checked for a reaction so far during several weeks of trial.

“I understood what Tim was ultimately trying to accomplish,” Stolfus says.

Ah yes, I forgot we already knew Stolfus was internally skeptical about the plan. We’ve just been reminded about (and the jury has just seen for the first time) what he wrote internally: “I mean, everything we’re attempting is technically in violation of Google’s policies.”

I believe I saw that same email in Epic’s complaint filed in 2020, or perhaps when I was sifting through docs in the Epic v. Apple trial.

But, he seems to be saying, Epic didn’t lie when it said it would submit a build of Android that “fully complies with Google’s policies and restrictions.”

“Did Epic in fact do so?” he was asked.

“Yeah, we submitted it, and it went live on April 1st,” he said.

Epic had a deal with LG for a gaming-targeted phone. It still had a deal with Samsung as of 2022, four years running, to put it in the Galaxy Store. It talked to Razer and Lenovo and more.

And it had a deal with OnePlus, as we’ve repeatedly heard — Stolfus says his contacts at OnePlus promised to preinstall the app globally but “ended up only having preinstallation in India.”

Why? “Because Google blocked the proposal to preinstall our app on their devices outside of India,” he claims his OnePlus contacts told him. Google says OnePlus made its own choice.

The Samsung deal was the big one. In 2018, Epic estimated, 56 percent of devices that could run Fortnite, outside of China, were Samsung devices.

He says his job was to maintain and grow partnerships with OEMs in the Android space and work on the direct carrier billing business with carriers globally. He worked at Samsung as a manager of partnerships before that.

He was listed as a team lead for OEMs and partnerships in a “Fortnite Mobile Business Update / Deep Dive” document that just briefly flashed onto the screen.

Grant says that on the web, websites are identified to cause harm before those warning screens show up (as opposed to Google’s Unknown Sources flow, where the assumption is that everything unknown is a risk.)

He’s also explaining that streaming games are highly reliant on a good internet connection because they can’t buffer for a couple of seconds like a Netflix video and latency is so important for responsiveness.

(I’ve personally covered cloud gaming for over a decade, so I can confirm that’s true; they also depend on the distance between you and the cloud gaming server, your Wi-Fi, etc. There’s a lot of potential friction.)

“The bottom line is, there are many ways to play Fortnite on mobile devices, right?”

“You can play Fortnite on cloud gaming with no download, right? Just launch it and play.” Mach suggests there’s the Galaxy Store, Xbox Cloud Gaming, GeForce Now, and Amazon, as well as downloads.

Grant keeps trying to suggest there aren’t “many” but rather “several” or “a couple.” But Epic’s own website fortnite.com/mobile says, “There are many ways to play Fortnite on mobile devices!” and the jury just got to see that for themselves.

We’re going on a short break now.

If I had to guess, we’ll come back to how Epic tipped off Microsoft gaming boss Phil Spencer about Project Liberty, but not others, because it seems self-serving? We’ll see.

See image below. Today, Grant admits that warnings can be helpful.

Grant says he doesn’t know if partner support was “crucial,” as the blog post claims, “but it was very helpful,” he says.

In an old deposition, Grant was asked if Epic compensated Google for any of its services. He had a very diplomatic way of saying “not directly,” saying Fortnite fixes would lead to changes in Unreal Engine that would provide better performance for all mobile games that use the Unreal Engine.

He concluded: “I think it was a win-win as to compensation.”

(Big picture: Google is arguing it helped launch the game, only to watch Fortnite skip its store, twice, to avoid paying Google its cut of the proceeds.)

With no hesitation whatsoever, Grant replied: “Yes.”

Of course, Google has him dead to rights in internal communications. In 2020, Grant wrote: “The needle we are trying to thread is to not fall foul of any agreements we have with Google, other than as needed for Project Liberty.”

(Google has counterclaims against Epic for breaching its contract.)