Some interesting titbits have popped up in the ongoing Epic Games vs Google trial. According to the latest emails that have popped up, Google tried to buy out Epic Games even before Stadia, the dead cloud-gaming platform, was launched. Google thought of this idea of buying Epic Games in 2018, and in fact, it teamed up with Tencent to buy full ownership of Epic Games.
As per The Verge, Google was working on ‘Project Elektra' which would have seen Google buying a controlling stake in Epic Games to influence the gaming giant approach to Android. An email from Google’s Don Harrison reads, “We are bringing a package offering to BC on Thursday re Epic. Spoke to Jamie and I think we need a couple of pages about what investment could look like and someone there to discuss (based on whatever we can glean publicly). We just did a prep call and investment was the only way people could realistically think of to sway them on Epic’s approach to Android — because it’s easy to imagine us investing billions at some ridiculous valuation (for everyone except for the corpdev folks).”
Google apparently discussed investing around $2 billion to purchase Epic Games stakes
The new findings also reveal that Google’s Dave Sobota proposed that Google ally with Tencent and buy Epic Games' shares. If this had been a done deal, then Google could have co-owned Fornite, practically the biggest game in the world in 2018. Failing to purchase the entire stake, Google thought of purchasing a 20% stake in Epic Games for $2 billion. Moreover, ex-Stadia lead Phil Harrison also chimed in that Fornite could be a leading business driver for Google products such as YouTube (with increased watch time) and Google Cloud (by switching Fornite from Amazon's cloud services to Google's).
Also, it would have helped ‘Yeti', which eventually turned up to be Google's now-defunct Stadia cloud gaming platform. While nothing materialized in reality, it is quite fascinating to think about what could have been the outcome if Google had actually purchased Epic Games.
