Epic Games sues Google in Australia, arguing Google forces developers to use its payments system, expanding on lawsuits in US and UK against Google and Apple
Epic gave Fortnite players on iOS and Google Play a choice between Apple/Google payment … Isobel Asher Hamilton / Insider : Epic Games, the maker of “Fortnite,” has filed yet another lawsuit in its fight against Google and Apple Tech Xplore : Fortnite maker adds Google Australia to legal fight against tech giants WRAL TechWire : Epic broadens legal war against tech giants, suing Google in Australia
Context & Ripple Effects
The Australia filing is the third leg of a campaign Epic began when it sued Google in August 2020 over Play Store payments restrictions it called monopolistic, then took Apple on directly with a formal complaint to the European Commission weeks earlier. By adding an Australian court, Epic is arguing the same claim — forced use of Google's payments system — in a jurisdiction where neither company has yet been challenged on it.
First-order effects
- Google must defend its mandatory Play billing requirement in a new national court while already litigating the same practice in the US and UK, multiplying legal exposure on a single policy.
- Australian developers distributing through Google Play become the local test case for whether the payments mandate survives scrutiny outside the US.
Second-order effects
- Other large developers read the playbook: Match settled with Google ahead of the San Francisco trial of Epic's Play Store case, showing the lawsuits function as leverage for payment-fee concessions even short of a verdict.
- Epic widened the theory of harm beyond storefronts itself, accusing Samsung and Google of colluding through Samsung's Auto Blocker to deter rival app stores — pulling the handset layer into the same fight.
Third-order effects
- The pattern held far enough that by 2025 a judge ruled both companies' app stores anticompetitive and Epic announced Fortnite's return to iOS in Australia — the direct commercial payoff of filing in that jurisdiction four years earlier.
- If courts across jurisdictions keep validating the forced-billing argument, app store commissions stop being a private pricing decision and drift toward a regulated take rate set by litigation outcomes rather than platform discretion.
The trend: App store economics are being renegotiated through coordinated multi-jurisdiction litigation rather than any single antitrust case.