Sean Hollister

Koh replied: “It’s not clear how real of a risk this is. Apparently ABK in the past mention[ed] that they can build their own platform and generate higher cash flow. Again, not sure how realistic this is. They do have Battle.net and a large audience network with their King titles...”

He says Google believed it “could make [Riot] the next big gaming phenomenon” since it hadn’t yet released any of its games on mobile.

Google’s lawyer Michelle Park Chiu is asking if perhaps he was worried about consumers choosing a different phone — say, the iPhone — if he didn’t strike deals with developers to retain the games on Google Play.

“That was certainly a concern, yes.”

As for sim-ship: “We were worried consumers would move to other gaming platforms to find that great games content.”

“No, never.”

Google is spending its time normalizing concepts like contractually obligating developers to “sim-ship” their games. “We stuck to making sure they were launching their games on Google Play at the same time as every other platform and making sure they were at the same quality,” says Koh.

Koh admitted he spoke about Project Hug over chat with colleagues but said he didn’t remember if he turned on chat history. He says “everything substantial” was done in Google Docs.

A paragraph from Koh begins: “Our current investment package for Riot was motivated by 2 objectives: 1) have Riot choose Play vs. launching their own Android store.”

Later in the same email: “In my view, it’s because of objective #1 that we’re paying a higher premium in the first year as Riot builds up their business on Play.”

Koh continues to say it was about keeping games on Play, not blocking competing stores.

“Activision has told us they will build their own mobile store,” one line reads.

But Koh says Google was only worried about losing the games, not someone else gaining them, and we haven’t seen any obvious evidence yet to the contrary.

Google estimated that it would lose $243M a year in revenue if ABK removed its games. Its brand King makes Candy Crush, in case you’re unaware.

We’re also seeing emails between bizdev leaders at Google about how Activision was trying to negotiate $20M via YouTube and $100M of credits, plus many more millions of dollars for exclusive rights to stream all of Activision’s esports including the Overwatch League and Call of Duty League — $50M for year one of that, $60M for year two, with an option for a year three.

Ryan Wyatt, head of YouTube gaming, seemed skeptical in an email about the size of that deal, saying Activision didn’t yet generate $20M a year for YouTube.

And now we’re going on lunch break.

It also wanted to hire 59 new employees to manage these deals. With Samsung specifically, it wanted to “initiate gaming collaboration discussions, including direct financial value to Samsung of up to $250M through 2022.” We’ll hear about this more as Project Banyan.

It’s not clear from these documents alone if Google approved the first ask. Google has already said Banyan never happened.

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.