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According to a court filing on Thursday, Alphabet's Google has signed at least 24 arrangements with major app developers to prevent them from competing with its Play Store, including an agreement to pay Activision Blizzard $360 million (approximately Rs. 2,941 crore) over three years.
According to the document, Google has also committed to pay Tencent Holdings' Riot Games unit, which produces League of Legends, $30 million (approximately Rs. 245 crore) over a one-year period in 2020.
The financial information was revealed in a freshly unredacted record of a lawsuit Epic Games filed against Google in 2020. It accused Google of anticompetitive behaviour in its Android and Play Store operations.
Google has termed the complaint unfounded and full of inaccuracies. It claims that its partnerships to keep developers happy represent healthy competition.
Riot stated that it is studying the filing. Requests for comment were not returned by Activision.
Epic mostly lost a similar case against Apple, the other major app store supplier, last year. In that instance, an appeal decision is likely next year.
The Google agreements with developers are part of an internal effort known as "Project Hug," and they were described in earlier versions of the lawsuit but not in detail.
Payments for YouTube uploads are included, as are credits for Google ads and cloud services.
The agreement with Activision was disclosed in January 2020, shortly after the company informed Google that it was considering opening its own app store. According to court documents, partnering with Riot was also meant to "halt their in-house 'app store' ambitions."
Google predicted billions of dollars in lost app store sales if developers switched to alternative systems at the time.
According to Epic's complaint, Google understood that contracting with Activision "essentially guaranteed that (Activision) would abandon its ambitions to build a competitive app store." According to the lawsuit, the arrangement raises rates while decreasing service quality.
According to the court documents, among those who signed with Google as of July were gamemakers Nintendo and Ubisoft Entertainment, meditation app Calm, and education app company Age of Learning.
