An Epic victory would almost certainly spark wholesale changes on the App Store and Google Play that would cost Apple and Google significant amounts of money. Neither company wants that, naturally, and according to an updated filing based on newly unredacted information, Google even went so far as to contemplate buying some or all of Epic to eliminate the "threat" of competition.
"Not content with the contractual and technical barriers it has carefully constructed to eliminate competition, Google uses its size, influence, power, and money to induce third parties into anticompetitive agreements that further entrench its monopolies," the updated complaint, available via The Verge, says.
"For example, Google has gone so far as to share its monopoly profits with business partners to secure their agreement to fence out competition, has developed a series of internal projects to address the 'contagion' it perceived from efforts by Epic and others to offer consumers and developers competitive alternatives, and has even contemplated buying some or all of Epic to squelch this threat."
(The original filing, with redactions intact, can be seen
here.)
It's not known when exactly all of this happened, and apparently even Epic wasn't aware of it. "This was unbeknownst to us at the time, and because of the court’s protective order we’re just finding out now about Google’s consideration of buying Epic to shut down our efforts to compete with Google Play," CEO Tim Sweeney said on Twitter. "Whether this would have been a negotiation to buy Epic or some sort of hostile takeover attempt is unclear."
