Epic and Google withdraw their US settlement and Pokémon Go revenue skyrockets | Week in Mobile Games podcast

Right, so on to the news, the more important part.

There is big news that is currently happening and there may be more to come after this podcast.

I may decide to insert a segment at the end of what I'm saying if there is an update.

But the current big news ish, but it is big.

In general, it should be big news.

Google and Epic have withdrawn their attempt to settle their lawsuit in the US and to change the outcome of a US court ruling that said Google had an illegal monopoly over Android apps.

So you remember this was quite a while back now, and it came from

Epic's really, really long, years long battle with

the App Store and Google Play, but this specific one with Google.

It changed a few things.

And then since then, a case that you think was kind of defined, done, finished, and the appeals kind of didn't really work out in the end for Google.

Epic and Google then came up with a settlement.

And they've come up with basically a couple of ideas of what this might look like.

And it is now rolling out globally what they've settled on.

So initially...

And we reported at the time, Aaron, you did a big investigation really into how the impact of their initial proposal, which was basically to put the revenue share tier, I guess, based on monetization and how a game monetizes, which was really not part of the court case at any point and they just sort of made it up and it was one that ultimately would mostly have benefited Epic the way Fortnite monetizes which is through cosmetics and that is not how any other game monetizes so now they've settled on something else which is the like the 20% platform fee the 5% fee for the play store and then there's other tiers if you use Google Play services you get 15% subscriptions 10% etc etc anyway This week, this is all kind of getting sorted, in theory, in the case.

So one of the outcomes is that users will be able to download alternative stores directly through Google Play as of July 22nd.

The proposed change before, and I think is still applicable globally, had suggested a registered app stores program that requires marketplaces effectively to still be sideloaded.

So there now seems to be a system that's separate for the US in which Google must allow third-party stores through Google Play rather than through the registered app stores program.

Again, it's applicable worldwide.

We don't know

currently what's going on with the revenue share and link out fees, how that will shake out in the US specifically for Google Play.

So when they withdrew their settlement, this is part of the settlement that they've withdrawn in the US.

And now I guess it's kind of going to be up to the judge to decide what's going on.

We might hear more about that today.