Sean Hollister

Koh confirms that Google internally referred to those with a lower than 30 percent fee as “agitators.”

Google planned to target developers who were discontent with Google’s 30 percent rev share and had the capabilities to “go-it-alone” on Android, according to the document.

If I’m reading it correctly, Google was forecasting that 100 percent of top game developers would defect from Google Play by 2020 and that the “contagion effect” would consume an increasing percent of Google’s app store revenue every year, including 6 percent ($630M worth) in 2021, and 7 percent (over $800M) in 2022, for a cumulative total of $2B by the end of that year.

Lawrence Koh, former director of games business development at Google from 2019–2020, is now on the stand answering questions from Epic about Hug and a presentation titled “Boosting Top Game Developer Support & Securing Play Distribution on Samsung Devices.”

“We’ll never know that,” Moskowitz replied.

And with that, Epic seems to have thoroughly made its point that Google may have destroyed evidence. Not that it did — but that it might have.

The court is going on a short break.

Epic lawyer Moskowitz is asking tough questions again: “[The legal hold] required employees to take affirmative steps to retain chats, and you didn’t take affirmative steps to ensure they did so?”

“That’s right,” he says.

Lopez repeatedly said he didn’t know, couldn’t know, and wouldn’t speculate on what was inside them — even though he admitted earlier that Google employees absolutely use them for business, and after we’d seen Google employees turning off Chat History. “It’s quite possible that those chats contained substantive business information, right?” He wouldn’t say.

Google’s turn to talk to him, and perhaps make the decision not to retain employee’s personal chats seem reasonable.

“Google did not change its normal retention policy for chats, even when it was on a legal hold to do so?”

“That’s right,” answered Lopez.

The second-best answer was not to send the email and chat “off the record” via Hangouts instead because there’s still a risk that “any chat participant may save the conversation by simply pasting it into a doc or email.”

Lopez would not explicitly say that an employee might use it that way on purpose — he suggested it might be to protect their own personal conversations — but he did wind up roundabout admitting the tool could be used that way.

24 hours if chat history is turned off

Otherwise: 30 days for one-on-ones

18 months for chats in a threaded room (though apparently Google planned to change this back to 30 days in 1H 2021).