Sean Hollister

“If we don’t excel, shame on us, what we don’t like is when someone else has a competitive advantage,” he said.

You may be able to find the video right here — the place and year match up, but I can’t seem to download it on courtroom Wi-Fi to be absolutely sure.

In an old deposition, Miner said under oath that he “maybe” thought the intent was that a level playing field should apply to Google Play when other developers build app stores, too.

But carriers “eventually realized and heard us when we talked about the ability to have one place worldwide that was collecting apps and would have the ability to distribute on their network,” he says.

I imagine getting 25 or 30 percent of Android’s app store revenue didn’t hurt, either.

We were supposed to hear from Andy Rubin, the embattled “father of Android,” but we haven’t had any sign that his taped deposition will wind up getting played in court.

Right now, he’s just saying some things about why the early team wanted Android to be designed as an open platform and explaining how hard it was to get an app onto Verizon’s app platform back in the day.

“Phones and mobile networks were boring, the internet was all the rage” was the idea, and Android started talking to Google just in hopes of an endorsement, he said.

Full disclosure: my dad worked for Danger back in the day, and I used Sidekicks to type all my college notes and email them to myself.

1.) Web top up yes/no by region

2.) Promotional $ amount

3.) Exclusivity

Under exclusivity, there were two sticking points:

a.) ability to go APK in addition to Play

b.) ability to partner with Epic, Signtel

Riot’s CFO says nothing about the Google deal kept it from shipping an APK or putting the game on other stores. So why didn’t Riot ship an APK or put the game on Epic?

At the end of a long deposition, Sottosanti is no longer being categorical that there was no arrangement — we’re actually leaning slightly the opposite way. He doesn’t know for sure, and he says there was indeed a perception that Google wouldn’t want to do the deal if Riot bypassed the Play Store, even if he was not aware of any formal business agreement or informal understanding not to do so.

The “complexity” of most items is listed as “low” “very low” or “none,” with the exception of mobile payments, which is listed as “Medium (new capability).”

“All of the capabilities built in the process of preparing self-publishing for LR are reusable and can be then applied (after proper skinning) to other mobile games released by Riot,” the page ends.

Riot’s CFO dismissed it as an “initial educational document from technical to business people” about “what it would take” to make such a thing happen.

Epic is also pointing out that Riot’s typical strategy of attempting to distribute a game as broadly as possible and prioritize its own payment system (where it pays “generally between 2 and 5 percent, depending on the partner” on PC) doesn’t gel with the idea it would only ship the Android version of its game on the Google Play Store.

In fact, a 2018 Riot mobile strategy document has a line reading, “Steps can be taken to drive players into relatively low fee channels, preserving margin.” Yet Riot doesn’t allow players to sideload its APK on Android, where it could do just that.

I expect Epic will come back to some of these other bullet points in just a moment. Update: Yep, sure enough, Epic just brought them up moments after I pressed publish.

It’s not yet clear — but in sworn testimony for the Epic v. Google trial recorded just weeks ago on October 27th, 2023, that we heard live in court, Riot Games CFO said, “We’re working toward making them available on console platforms such as Xbox and Sony PlayStation.”

And if there were, he would have been aware of it as CFO, he testified.