In the last few days, we have heard a lot of rumors about Activision Blizzard receiving sums of money from Google for not creating any competition by putting the company's games on a store other than the Google Play Store, but now a response has come from the concerned company with categorical denials.

Activision Blizzard has called Epic Games’ claim that it was bribed not to build its own app store “absurd,” denying that it received $1.4T360 million in exchange for not competing with Google. This comes after Epic recently revealed that Google pays competitors to keep games on its App Store.

Epic is accusing Activision Blizzard's partner Google of paying us not to compete with them.

To be clear: this is false.

Google has never asked us, pressured us, or made us agree not to compete with them – and we have already presented documents and testimony that refute this nonsense.

– Lulu Cheng Meservey (@lulumeservey) November 17, 2022

Dubbed “Project Hug,” the court documents point to the fact that Google paid hundreds of millions to various companies to convince them to remain on the Google Play Store. With all of this denied Activision Blizzard These reports say it was never “pressured” not to compete with Google.

Google has never asked us, pressured us, or made us agree not to compete with them, we have already provided documentation and certifications saying this is bullshit.

Google has yet to issue a statement on the matter, and it appears the tech giant will avoid commenting on the matter altogether. This move comes after Fortnite was removed from its App Store in an effort to avoid sharing revenue from in-app purchases with Google and Apple, as well as to prevent the companies from taking the opportunity to do so themselves.

We'll certainly see how these consequences and reports develop at some point. But don't expect an answer anytime soon, especially since we're in the midst of a major acquisition of the company by Microsoft.