Sean Hollister

He told me I got the exclamation points right in this story, which made me LOL. Later, I saw him laughing at one of our Verge bingo cards, asking a colleague if anyone’s said “metaverse” yet. I don’t think they have?

Oh and — we’ve tentatively got a date for an interview with Tim, though it won’t happen till after the jury verdict. He says he doesn’t want to interrupt (or was it interfere?) with the court process.

That $90M+ included:

$12M+ in pre-registration support on the store

$20M+ in merchandising launch support

$10M+ in post-launch promotion

$5M for a gift card retail program

$15M in co-marketing dollars (pre-reg and launch)

$10M in a Google Ads reimbursement program, $1 for every $3 spent up to $30 million dollars

$3M for a YouTube community development program

$20M+ in Google Cloud credits with “(2% of game rev on play as credits)”

“Dedicated technical, launch, growth, marketing, and BD Google staff for Riot Games”

“Dedicated quarterly code review, growth, optimization, and UI/UX workshops”

In exchange, Riot had to commit to sim-ship and content parity (with an exception for telcos) — but there was no requirement to stay exclusive to Google Play, we’re seeing. Google’s lawyer is walking Riot’s CFO through contract after contract, addendum after addendum, and none of them mention exclusivity or a Riot store.

So if Google stopped Riot from launching a store, it would have been through a private understanding — and Riot’s CFO says there wasn’t one.

He does say he believes it was Riot’s “perception” that Google believed Riot would sideload its games, bypassing Google’s store, if Google didn’t come through with the promised credits, though.

Here’s another, though. (Riot used underline instead of bold, but I don’t have that option at this moment):

Among the other platforms Riot considered, according to the document: Singtel and Epic Games.

On a page titled “Maximizing margins” that considered the pros and cons of going with Epic and Singtel lives this phrase:

“Cons: frustrating Google.”

The document shows that Riot was aware it could technically be on more stores in addition to Google Play, but I saw yet another bullet point that suggested it could be detrimental to the Google relationship, too.

Apparently this came up in a meeting where all of Google Play’s leadership was present:

Riot’s CFO now says he doesn’t think sideloading was explicitly mentioned in that meeting, though.

Google also wrote internally that it didn’t want Riot to do an app store.

He says Riot began discussions to launch games on Google Play before it had ported any games to mobile. It wound up signing an $18M deal with Google, which, Epic has tried to suggest, blocked Riot from launching its own mobile app distribution platform.

He says his understanding is Riot pays Apple the standard 30 percent service fee.

Lawyers just showed that ABK also considered a different deal with a redacted company. The business presentation included this note:

“Note: these deals are mutually exclusive and ABK will only enter into the one we determine as the best option.” Zerza confirms ABK choose Google over the other company, and (Google’s? Epic’s?) lawyer is driving home that ABK did so because the terms of the deal were simply better for ABK.

One of those terms that I managed to nab before it flashed off-screen:

We briefly saw the entire term sheet, but it was shown too small for us to read.

However, there’s apparently a document that implies the January 2020 deal did derail the Project Boston plan to do so, at least: “It led us to make the decision to pivot the plans for Boston,” read a lawyer, off a document I didn’t manage to see myself.

Here is another bullet about its proposed app store I missed getting into earlier posts:

ABK had an “estimated steady state goal of 10-12%” for its store, rather than the 30 percent fee it pays Google, according to the Boston presentation. Zerza said he couldn’t confirm the number.

In 2021, the plan was to reach “ABK solution at scale,” with 45–70 employees working on the project.

ABK’s CFO says that sounds very low. “This is not consistent with what I think it would take to develop a store like this,” he says, saying other internal efforts have hundreds of people.

The first version would have exclusively had King games like the mega-popular Candy Crush, but could stretch to Activision and Blizzard games later.

Details:

“Goals”:

Here’s the part where ABK suggests it could stretch to Blizzard games:

The MVP would have had 15 people working on it within the company, according to the slide we’re seeing.

Overall, the app would be:

I’m copying down the details about those paths best I can:

“At the time, we were talking to Google about an enterprise-wide deal which we obviously signed with Google in early 2020,” says the company’s CFO.

“At the same time we were also looking at our own mobile store,” he says. ABK wants you to think it genuinely pursued these ideas in parallel, but he hasn’t yet told us when ABK stopped pursuing the store.

Correction: I typo’d: the Google deal was early 2020, not early 2022.

“Project Boston” shows two parallel “paths” for ABK through the mobile app landscape, only one of which would be chosen in the end.

ABK wanted either a mobile app store or, alternatively, a $100M+ deal with Google. We know which one it got.

“Path 1: Enterprise negotiation” read: “capture stronger economics for ABK across mobile, YouTube, advertising, media spend, and cloud” and “$100M+ per year value creation for ABK and growth in overall book of business between ABK and Google”

“Path 2: Build own mobile store” includes this incredibly important bit, which ABK bolded for emphasis: “Should we secure real savings with Google, we would deprioritize path 2.”