Sean Hollister
That’s it for Epic v. Google day five.
You’ll want to be here tomorrow: we should be hearing from Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
Sean Hollister
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Sean Hollister
Sean Hollister
Epic corrected the “fake Fortnite” vulnerability within a day, lawyer says.
Epic attorney Yonatan Even asked Rosenberg this, and he said it sounded correct. Even also suggested that Epic and Samsung did not need to change the install flow in order to fix the “fake Fortnite” issue. (Presumably, that means it didn’t need to let Google add its Unknown Sources warnings, but I don’t know for certain.)
Even also pointed out Google didn’t implement its iOS-matching 15 percent subscription rev share till January 2018, and Rosenberg said he wasn’t aware of a single developer pulling out of Google Play and focusing efforts on iOS because of that delay.
Sean Hollister
Google wanted to lick Apple’s cookie.
Google Play boss Jamie Rosenberg, May 28th, 2016:
We’re starting to hear an escalation of the rumors that Apple will be changing its revshare on subscriptions to 85/15, potentially as early as WWDC (which is the week of 6/10).
Later in the email:
It’s a scramble but I think we need to assume the rumor is true and plan accordingly. If we can move quickly, we have a good opportunity to “lick the cookie” and preempt Apple’s announcement.
Apple did go ahead with the announcement, but Google did not lick the cookie.
(It shows the jury more of Google’s rev share changes predate the Epic lawsuit, though.)
Sean Hollister
Google, not Epic, is highlighting the LRAP deals it gave some developers.
While Netflix might have gotten a sweetheart deal on a better “LRAP++,” Google is positioning the original Living Room Accelerator Program as something fair it erected to compete with Apple.
It appears that Google Android boss Hiroshi Lockheimer may have proposed the idea in March 2015:
At our weekly TV meeting the topic of apps for TV came up and Serge pointed out he thinks Apple is offering a 15% revshare in this space and locking in content developers (a la HBO — he says Showtime have gone silent too and he thinks they’ve cut a deal with Apple as well.) I’m worried that we’re about to massively lose this developer base. Any ideas on what we could do to remain competitive? Can we also offer 15%? Or something even more interesting?
Sean Hollister
Google tries to claim it was concerned about fake Fortnite — not surprise Samsung competition.
Sameer Samat sent his “something is wrong” message on August 8th, 2018. On August 13th, a different Googler had another reason to be concerned:
I took a deeper look on Friday and discovered a vulnerability in the Fortnite Installer (and Galaxy Apps private installer API) which allows a malicious app to install a fake version of Fortnite with arbitrary permissions granted.
That sounds concerning, but it also happened days later. Was Google’s kneejerk really about security or competition? I’m genuinely not sure. Could be both?
Sean Hollister
“Android Brand Impact.”
Google found another mention of Apple to ask the witness about: in a 2018 Google Business Council review of a proposed Epic Fortnite deal, the “Android Brand Impact” of not moving forward has two bullet points:
“inconsistent access to AA games”
and
“increases perception gap vs. iOS ecosystem”
Sean Hollister
Epic doesn’t entirely get to say, “Where’s Apple?” this time!
Here’s part of February 2019 email from Rosenberg that suggests at least one Samsung dealmaker was interested in competing with Apple rather than just Google:
Here is what Jay said about Samsung’s goals:
*Primary motivation for investing in Games is to compete with Apple
*Secondary motivation to have some differentiation vs. the Chinese OEMs.
*Also, YJ Kim (head of services) has a revenue target in this area — though also gets credit somehow for how his activities help device sales.
I guess we now know who YJ is, too!
Sean Hollister
“Green bubble / blue bubble: we really wanted to work hard with Samsung to counteract that.”
As usual, Google is working to normalize the business dealings that Epic is trying to demonize, and that begins with showing that Google Play boss Rosenberg had a relationship with Samsung for a reason: he was “working day to day with the partner management team at Samsung.”
Here’s Rosenberg, today:
We felt we were very vulnerable collectively on gaming [...] iPhones had been very strong on gaming, a number of top game titles launched first on iPhones and worked better on iPhones, and we were talking with Samsung about how we together did not have a strong experience on Android devices.
Sean Hollister
“Cryptic.”
“YJ also said some cryptic thing that we would *not* do another deal like fortnite again. I asked why — he said it was not good for google/samsung.”
I spotted this intriguing passage in one of the Rosenberg emails earlier. Wonder why Epic didn’t highlight it?
Rosenberg didn’t do anything to preserve his Google chats, despite receiving a litigation hold in this case, he told Epic’s attorney.
It is now Google’s turn to question him.
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