Epic Games has been in the limelight for the last few months, courtesy of the legal battle against Apple and then the ongoing US lawsuit against Google for its alleged Play Store requirements. To be precise the use of Google’s in-app billing system cutting a chunk off the revenue generated by game publishers. This ongoing court battle has now unearthed some interesting facts – one of them being Google’s point of view about sideloading of apps outside the Play Store.
The tech giant has labeled sideloading as “awful” and “abysmal” experience for the end-user(s), which is a bit overcooked statement. According to a Google representative, sideloading approach takes more than 15 steps for the process which mars the whole end-user experience.
Epic Games has been trying to persuade the courts that this de facto monopoly by Google and Apple as they deliberately make it difficult for publishers to sideload apps. This painted statement by the Google representative is blown out of proportion to put up a case against the argument.
In the call notes, it was clear that the concerned person mentioned that Epic should be considerate that most of the users will not like going through such a pain-staking process. According to them, this would limit the game publishers’ reach and lead to user confusion.
To this Epic further quoted an internal Google document which called game publisher’s plan “contagion” threatening the search engine giant. Epic also alleged that Google was considering buying some part of Epic Games (or all of it) to eliminate this threat.
Google could have rather put up the argument of sideloading apps outside the ecosystem as a security threat to the user, rather than giving this weak argument. Ultimately this has only strengthened Epic Games’ position anyways and what transpires (any more classified information leaks out into public) further is going to be interesting in this legal spat!
