That might be the grossest headline I’ve ever seen.

As per The Verge, the court case revealed email testimony between Google executives that laid out preliminary ideas and plans for the gaming platform.

In July 2018, Phil Harrison [ex-Stadia lead] wrote the following regarding a potential Epic acquisition or stake purchase:

I’ve taken a stab at a high-level strategic rationale for an investment in Epic.

  Fortnite is (or can be) the leading business driver for Google across:

  YouTube (already 100M+increase in game watch time MAU)
  GCP (to shift 130M+players from AWS and build an anchor tenant in games)

Dav Sobota, who served as director of corporate development at Google from 2008 - 2018, replied with the following message that discussed potential plans to team up with Tencent in some way:

   As a potential alternative, Phil is proposing we consider approaching Tencent to either

   (a) buy Epic shares form Tencent to get more control over Epic (unclear how that helps us without a majority share) or

   (b) join up with Tencent to buy 100% of Epic (and then of course we do a lot of deep commercial things with Epic).

got us so worried about the Deep State, we forgot about Deep Commercial

As much as I dislike Epic Games, that’s the biggest heck no for me.

Don’t worry, look what happened to stadia etc.

I know Epic gets a lot of hate, but this is definitely a possible worst case outcome. Hopefully anything but this happens instead.

2018 though

Ah yes, our shitty Big Tech corporations teaming up with the shitty Chinese Big Tech corporations, I don’t see there any issues at all.

Pure evil

When your game of choice is proprietary it is part of a big, copyright trading card game.