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submitted 10 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

Google is ‘crooked’ and a bully, CEO of Fortnite-maker Epic Games testifies in Play Store trial::Epic alleges that Google has been engaged in illegal price-gouging by collecting commissions ranging from 15% to 30% on in-app digital transactions.

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[-] rtxn@lemmy.world 159 points 10 months ago

I mean, he's not incorrect, but there's that saying about rocks and glass houses.

[-] Mac@mander.xyz 10 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

That's right.

"Don't decorate your glass house with polished rocks" or something.

[-] MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 5 points 10 months ago

"Don't throw glass at your rock house."?

[-] rtxn@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago

Don't put your house of rocks in a glass.

[-] Deepus@lemm.ee 5 points 10 months ago

Yes thats part of it. The full saying is "Don't throw glass at your rock house, unless you want a glass moat."

[-] MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 2 points 10 months ago

I think I've done all of these things in Minecraft at one point or another....

But a glass moat sounds freaking metal 🤘 lol

[-] Tattorack@lemmy.world 105 points 10 months ago

Oh no! One terrible corporation is saying the other terrible corporation is terrible!

Let me play a very sad tune on this really tiny violin I found.

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[-] mothattack@lemmy.ml 59 points 10 months ago
[-] BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 15 points 10 months ago

Pot calls fellow pot black. 😝

[-] reverendsteveii@lemm.ee 2 points 10 months ago

the thing about that is, the kettle is black.

[-] scottmeme@sh.itjust.works 36 points 10 months ago

I'm against epic. Fuck them, hope they lose the lawsuit.

[-] Caligvla@lemmy.dbzer0.com 50 points 10 months ago

You know a company sucks when the public decides to side with fucking Google instead of them.

[-] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 15 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Seriously, I actually agree with what they're arguing in the lawsuit, but it's one of those "worst person you know manages to make a good point" situations. You don't want to actually agree with them, because you understand they have ulterior motives for having that position.

Despite Google being the bad guy in this, I certainly do not fucking want a shit-ass company like Epic to fucking win.

[-] filister@lemmy.world 14 points 10 months ago

Actually Google wasn't that bad in the past. They did a lot of good, open sourced a lot of projects, made a lot of Linux contributions, gave us AOSP, Kubernetes, Golang, Tensor Flow, etc.

They even had a moonshot program, working on a lot of emerging technologies, and were in general pretty cool. I think things started to go downhill when they announced Alphabet, back then they started to optimize their operations by minimising the costs and maximizing their profits. In general this made their shareholders pretty happy and the rest pretty sour.

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[-] ElPussyKangaroo@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago
[-] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 64 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

They tried to beat Steam at their own game by paying studios a massive amount to release games exclusively on their platform. They brought "console exclusives" to fucking PC gaming and they can fuck off and eat shit for that.

They tried to entice gamers by giving them free copies of these games. They never, not once, tried to improve the quality of their application or give basic features that Steam has had for literally a decade. They don't actually care about customer satisfaction or good quality of service. They went on a stupid spree of buying game studios and basically killing them, just like EA used to do.

(A good example is when they bought Rocket League, which had a perfectly functional Linux-native version, but when they bought it they were like "FUCK LINUX" and literally removed the existing Linux-native version of Rocket League. That's when I stopped playing.)

They were in it to spend as much money as possible in an attempt to extract as much money as possible in a vain attempt to dominate the market. They failed at that miserably because these stupid chucklefucks don't actually know how to run a successful business by being good to their customers. Being good to your customer categorically is not just giving away free shit.

And if that shitty narcissistic bullshit wasn't enough, they also did dumb shit like buying the music site Bandcamp, doing literally fucking nothing with it for two years, and then selling it to fucking ad-men who immediately fired half the staff and started hollowing out the company.

I will never forgive them for killing bandcamp. The last place you could make sure a musician got 100% of the proceeds of buying their music (as opposed to Spotify which pays... $0.003 cents per stream. Also Bandcamp offered DRM-free fully lossless audio files (FLAC). There literally was not a better music service if you cared about 1. Paying artists fairly 2. Getting good quality audio and 3. Real ownership of the music itself where it can't be taken from you by changing licensing deals.

Tim Sweeney can go die in a fucking fire and I hope that same fire burns down Epic headquarters with all the C-Suite inside. They've always been a shitty company who cared about money first, and customers and their employees dead last. That's proof enough with their fucking idiotic spending spree followed up with selling stuff like Bandcamp and laying people off. They don't even have sound business strategy, a bunch of fucking loser ass morons who failed upward.

[-] Vilian@lemmy.ca 22 points 10 months ago

don't forget, devs from the rocket league also got laid off a few weeks ago

[-] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 14 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Yeah, Epic laid off tooooooons of people. They could have, you know, not pissed away so much money for so many years, and done better for their employees but Tim Sweeney is like "whoops fuck you I guess haha."

God he's got such a punchable dick face.

[-] Vilian@lemmy.ca 17 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

they bought a brazilian game company that made a very fun game and now they only do fortnite skins, they can just explode and the world could be a better place

edit:horizon chase turbo is the game, piracy it and play, it's really fun, just don't give them more money

[-] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 10 months ago

Oh fuck I read about this game. This was one of the studios they killed? Brutal. Every day I learn new depths of scummery from Epic.

[-] deus@lemmy.world 6 points 10 months ago

Fucking hell, I had no idea and I love this game. This is where I draw the line, I'm joining the Epic hate train now.

[-] runblack@reddthat.com 11 points 10 months ago

+1 for such an extensive, well-founded rant

[-] AliasWyvernspur@lemmy.world 8 points 10 months ago

I will never forgive them for killing bandcamp.

It ain't dead yet, but it's not looking good. I second this sentiment, however. I love Bandcamp and was so pissed when they bought it, only to be more pissed when they basically threw it away like a used napkin. Fuck Timmy Tencent.

[-] elephantium@lemmy.world 6 points 10 months ago

$0.003 cents per stream.

So... #verizonmath means I have to ask: Is this supposed to be 3/1000ths of a penny per stream? Or 3/10ths of a penny per stream? You labeled the amount with both dollars and cents :(

[-] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I suppose that's true. It's supposed to be 3/10ths of one cent. My bad on writing both, force of (bad) habit.

Also there's Spotify and potentially a distributor also taking a cut of this payment before it gets to the artist. Spotify takes 30%, so 1/10th of each 3/10th of a cent, along with whatever cut the distributor takes.

On Bandcamp Fridays, you're able to pay 100% to the artist.

[-] ElPussyKangaroo@lemmy.world 6 points 10 months ago
  1. Jeez that is terrible. I did NOT expect to resonate with your pain as much as I did. Yikes.

  2. Fkn amazing username.

[-] AstralPath@lemmy.ca 4 points 10 months ago

They brought “console exclusives” to fucking PC gaming and they can fuck off and eat shit for that.

Honest question, why is this bad? I don't understand.

[-] Wrench@lemmy.world 20 points 10 months ago

I think you misunderstand. They didn't bring games that were exclusive to consoles, to PC. They took the idea of exclusives to PC app markets. I.E. paying game studios for exclusive rights to distribute on PC. It's anti competitive and a completely artificial limitation, since obviously, for PC games, the hardware is the same regardless of Steam or Epic app stores. And that violates a long standing core value for many PC gamers as an entirely open market.

[-] AstralPath@lemmy.ca 7 points 10 months ago

Yes that was exactly what I was thinking. Thanks for clearing that up.

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[-] NinjaJoey209@lemmy.ca 3 points 10 months ago

Yeah, I'm confused about the price gouging too. Not sure what they did exactly. I remember fondly that Apple had an issue with then and how they advertised app purchases, but not with Google Play Store.

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[-] rusticus@lemm.ee 35 points 10 months ago

Projection is a thing Epic. Be less Republican.

[-] isles@lemmy.world 7 points 10 months ago

Takes one to know one? Or something silly.

[-] RizzRustbolt@lemmy.world 26 points 10 months ago

Their crooked bullies.

Our strategic entrepreneurs.

[-] reverendsteveii@lemm.ee 18 points 10 months ago

I wholeheartedly believe google is breaking the law to maximize profits, but I also feel like this headline is designed to make it seem as though the people suing are just butthurt and that their primary complaint is that they don't like google personally and feel that their opinion as to whether google is kind and nice should be legally actionable.

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[-] honey_im_meat_grinding@lemmy.blahaj.zone 16 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

You don't have to support Epic's ultimate goal of increasing their profit, to understand that the monopoly power this lawsuit is fighting is even worse. Apple and Google should not be able to gatekeep what kind of apps we get to use - any argument in favour of them basically boils down to "they let us avoid malicious apps" but you can have democratic orgs decide that instead of oligarchical cartels. And I don't necessarily mean the government, although government regulation would be a welcome move, I mean even more democratic:

In Finland, some of the largest grocery chains (think Walmart) are collectively, democratically owned - in other words, they operate in the same boring, stable, functional, and efficient manner as other grocery shops without being undemocratic(!). The average Finnish person has say in what products are being stocked, can be elected managers of stores, and the coop gives members 5% of their spending back (i.e. revenue sharing), among other things. [1] For reference, in the UK, we get a measly 1% back from grocery shop purchases, or from Amex with their cashback.

Sure, Epic won't give us this democratic org, but they do help us challenge the gatekeepers that are way more invested in working against giving us anything like this.

[1] https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2023/10/11/inside-the-walmart-of-finland/

[-] SRo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 10 months ago

Sure Timmy. Timmmmmmeeeeeyyyyyyy.

[-] Mojojojo1993@lemmy.world 7 points 10 months ago

No shit Sherlock. Every company is. How they make stupid cash monies.

[-] LazaroFilm@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago
[-] filister@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

I believe they removed this from their company policy a couple of years ago.

[-] LazaroFilm@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

Yes they did. I wonder why…

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[-] autotldr@lemmings.world 2 points 10 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney on Monday portrayed Google as a ruthless bully that resorts to shady tactics to protect a predatory payment system.

Sweeney’s more than two-hour stint on the witness stand in San Francisco came less than a week after Google CEO Sundar Pichai defended before the 10-member jury the way his company runs its Play Store for Android apps.

Much of Kravis’ his cross-examination appeared design to cast Sweeney as an executive primarily interested in bypassing a long-standing commission system to boost his video game company’s profits.

He attributed the disappointing response to Google machinations that made it a cumbersome process to do outside the Play Store and the use of pop-up “scare screens” warning of potential problems with the software.

Epic then filed antitrust lawsuits as part of what Sweeney framed as a crusade on behalf of all game makers as more play occurs on smartphones instead of consoles and PCs.

During his questioning of Sweeney, Google lawyer Kravis laid out the 30% commissions that Epic pays to Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo for transactions on the PlayStation, Xbox and Switch consoles without complaint while still raking in billions of dollars in profit from those platforms.


The original article contains 780 words, the summary contains 197 words. Saved 75%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

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this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
367 points (96.9% liked)

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