"I'm buying a lot of X from you. I notice you sell Y. Can I get a discount on Y?" Quite standard. People do it at the farmers' market. And it's almost definitely not anti-trust because selling cloud compute is unrelated to running an app store.
Different departments but still Google (rather than different Alphabet entities, which is much less trivial). Cross-PA GTM collaboration has been a priority for years now, and the two places they've made serious inroads have been Ads + Cloud and Geo/Maps + Cloud. I wouldn't be surprised if Play + Cloud was emergent, too.
Why wouldn't every big company stand up their infra on GCP then? Especially games and things that don't have huge backend requirements, this would be a no-brainer.
It would scream anti-trust though, and would surely attract the attention of regulators (which are already circling in the skies)
> Why wouldn't every big company stand up their infra on GCP then?
Because Amazon is likely already giving big companies discounts. There is a huge amount of competition between the big 3 cloud providers who work whatever deals they can to get big customers.
> Most companies running on AWS/GCP/Azure are paying nowhere near the advertised costs
This is true, but it misses a big motivation behind it. It costs more to have enough capacity to support on-demand use since it has to sit idle, waiting for a customer. Part of the discount you get is you give AGA certainty in demand. They don't need to hold as many machines in the on-demand pool, and it makes long-term planning easier. You'll also find that those on-demand prices don't actually scale. At some point, you'll have to talk to a rep and commit to more hardware and a discount because you're just too big.
Yup. In B2B in particular, everything is negotiable. The sums of money are large so there's a lot of wiggle room. There's also a lot more strategy involved. It could be the end of the quarter and the someone needs sale or they just want to improve the relationship for the next deal. It can also be as simple as the competition is against companies that hate each other and they'll happily eat a worse deal to get it done to spite the other. One of the fun parts of the business side is coming up with creative ways to get a deal done. Not dissimilar from coming up with creative ways to solve engineering problems.
Take a look at my post further up. I think something similar was done for Niantic, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of these publishers also have sweetheart Play deals: https://cloud.google.com/solutions/games
I would say because Spotify has moat? Wouldn’t even be surprised if it is in top 5 apps in the world “running in the background”. Both Google and Spotify kinda win with this agreement. Plus having “Spotify runs on GCP” is a huge advertisement for other enterprise customers.
