Epic Games asks court to prevent Google from pulling Bandcamp from Play Store over use of its own billing system

Epic Games continues its fight against app stores’ payment systems. The Fortnite maker is now asking a court to prevent Google from removing Bandcamp from the Play Store.

A motion for a preliminary injunction was filed to the US District Court for the Northern District of California on April 29, The Verge reported. 

• Google threatened to delist Bandcamp because it is using its own billing system, not paying the company an app store fee.
• The music storefront has been doing so in accordance with Google’s guidelines, which exempted digital music apps from paying the commission.
• “However, Google is now modifying its rules to require Bandcamp (and other apps like it) to exclusively use Google Play Billing for payments for digital goods and services, and pay a revenue share to Google,” Bandcamp CEO Ethan Diamond said in a new blog post.
• According to the new rules, the music storefront will have to make changes before June 1 and start paying Google 10% from every transaction, which is still lower than a standard app store fee of 30%.
• Epic Games is now saying that the new Play Store rules would make it harder for Bandcamp to continue paying musicians 82% of their revenues.
• “Paying Google even a 10 percent revenue share would force Epic to change Bandcamp’s current business model or else operate the Bandcamp business at a long-term loss,” the argument reads.
• On top of that, Epic noted that it will require a “significant time and effort” to build the infrastructure needed to integrate Google’s payment system.

Epic Games acquired Bandcamp in March, saying that it will help achieve the platform’s goal of “empowering more creators in a fair and open way.”