During a recent hearing in San Francisco, Epic’s CEO Tim Sweeney revealed that the agreement is related to Fortnite’s metaverse: “Epic’s technology is used by many companies in the space Google is operating in to train their products, so the ability for Google to use the Unreal Engine more fullsome… sorry, I’m blowing this confidentiality.”

In this partnership, Epic will spend $800 million to buy some unannounced services from Google. However, this is not a joint product made by the companies. “This is Google and Epic each separately building product lines,” Sweeney said.

Sweeney doesn’t see anything wrong with paying Google “to encourage much more robust competition than they’ve allowed in the past,” he said. “We view this as a significant transfer of value from Epic to Google.”