New info from the Epic v Google trial shows that in 2018, Google had floated the idea of teaming up with Tencent to buy full 100% ownership of Epic Games.
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
got us so worried about the Deep State, we forgot about Deep Commercial