Epic Games also wants to address Google about app store policy after Apple

You probably got something from it, the tech lawsuit of 2021: Epic Games versus Apple. The game company disagreed with the tech company’s App Store policies and took it to court. Now it seems to be in a similar case with Google over the Play Store.

epic games

Epic Games plans to buy music platform Bandcamp, but isn’t quite happy with how Google is handling the app. Epic Games has filed a lawsuit against Google for not wanting Google to remove the app from the Play Store. However, there is a good chance that this will happen: Bandcamp does not follow the rules of the Play Store because it does not use the payment options of Play Store. Exactly what Epic Games and Apple were quarreling about.

Bandcamp founder Ethan Diamond describes it this way: “Since 2015, artists and labels have been using Bandcamp’s Android app to sell music and merchandise directly to their fans. We used our proprietary billing system to process payments, in accordance with Google’s guidelines exempting specific digital music from making a revenue share. However, Google is now amending its rules to require Bandcamp (and other similar apps) to use only Google Play billing for payments for digital goods and services, and pay a share of revenue to Google.”

Bandcamp on the Play Store

These changes will take effect on June 1. That means Bandcamp will have to pass Google’s costs on to consumers or artists, turn off constant loss of digital sales in the Android app. Bandcamp would have to pay 30 percent of the in-app sales from June 1. It may have made a deal with Google that it was only 10 percent, but according to Bandcamp, each percentage directly impacts artists and/or customers. On the other hand, this new policy doesn’t just come out of the blue: Bandcamp has known for a year that this adjustment is coming.

Google therefore believes that Epic’s claim lacks a solid foundation and even says it has agreed to 10 percent with Bandcamp, which is much lower than what it charges its own users for the service. Bandcamp wants to have 15 percent on the first $5,000 in sales (and 10 percent after that). In short, whether this will get as huge a legal tail as the Epic-Apple case, probably not.

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