Google quietly paid sport builders a whole bunch of thousands and thousands of {dollars} in incentives to maintain their video games on the Play Store, a newly unredacted complaint from Epic Games in its antitrust swimsuit in opposition to Google alleges. The program was referred to as “Project Hug,” or later because the “Apps and Games Velocity Program.”

In 2018, when Fortnite for Android first launched, Epic Games took the weird step of completely releasing it exterior of the Google Play Store. Instead, gamers needed to obtain an installer instantly from Epic’s web site, permitting the corporate to bypass Google’s 30 p.c price — at the price of a much less user-friendly set up course of. Epic Games would ultimately relent and launch Fortnite on the Play Store in April 2020 (not less than, till it was eliminated once more by Google after Epic added a characteristic permitting gamers to bypass Google’s price when making in-app purchases, kicking off the present slate of lawsuits.)

But Epic’s criticism alleges that Google was so involved in regards to the thought of different builders following Fortnite’s lead — and slicing it out of the profitable enterprise — that it launched a program referred to as “Project Hug” to be sure that builders would follow the Play Store.

According to the criticism, a 2019 report compiled by Google Play’s finance workforce raised considerations that Epic may prepare a cope with OEMs like Samsung to preinstall its competing retailer, profitable over builders with guarantees of decrease income splits (a tactic Epic makes use of with the PC-based model of its retailer) and serving to pave the way in which for Android customers to show to different different storefronts. In whole, the workforce estimated that the Epic Games Store on Android may lead to a misplaced of between $350 million and $1.4 billion to Google by 2022; if different app shops like Amazon’s or Samsung’s “gained full traction” alongside Epic, these losses may develop from $1.1 billion to $6 billion.

Project Hug was designed as a part of the trouble to restrict Epic’s affect, as “a hug developers close and show love plan,” or “a surge plan to throw extra love/promotion to top developers and games (including Tencent portfolio companies),” Android executives defined in inner paperwork. In apply, that translated in additional sensible phrases to spending “hundreds of millions of dollars on secret deals with over 20 top developers” that the corporate had deemed most susceptible to falling to Epic’s “contagion.”

Google’s paperwork word that, whereas lots of the focused builders had inquired about income share or thought-about their very own distribution platforms, Project Hug was largely a hit. By the tip of 2020, Google had signed offers with most of its Project Hug targets — most notably Activision Blizzard — to maintain them within the Play Store.