Epic and Google are finally seeing each other in court this week, and things have actually taken a rather interesting turn. For starters, Gary Bornstein, who is representing Epic Games in this case, claims that the search engine giant has destroyed evidence, which is a bold claim, to say the least.

Google's fight with Epic Games continues as more accusations are thrown at the search engine giant

Bornstein made the following statement:

“All we know is whatever is in the destroyed chats, as bad as the documents are, is worse. Or at least it was worse, before they were destroyed."

Bornstein's statement does hold some truth, as Google has been known to indulge in this practice every time there is internal company communication involved. Epic Games' lawyer also claims that some of the internal chats were set to delete after hitting a time limit.

The accusations don't end here, as the lawyer claims that a massive part of Google's monopoly with the Play Store is all about exclusive deals. It is alleged that over 22 different developers were convinced not to compete with the Play Store, and there were even some payments made to ensure that there is no competition. Riot Games, the studio behind Valorant and League of Legends, was among the studios.

This is not the first time we have heard about Google's exclusive deals, as the company is currently facing another trial with the Department of Justice, where it is accused of monopolizing its position as the default search engine on various devices.

There is no denying that Epic Games has made it clear on several occasions that Google's 30% Play Store fee is unfair. For instance, Epic Games Store is another popular storefront that uses the 88/12 strategy, where 88 percent of the revenue goes to the developer, and 12 percent goes to Epic. Which makes more sense as opposed to the 70/30 that we have been seeing for some time now.

It is still not clear where the clash of titans is going to end, but it is becoming more and more evident that Google has abused its position when it comes to having the upper hand. We are not sure if Epic Games is going to win this, but this is still going to be a landmark case that will be discussed for years to come. We will keep you posted as the story develops further.

News Source: The Verge