Phil Harrison, July 15th, 2018, “Strategic Rationale”:

I‘ve taken a stab at a high-level strategic rationale for an investment in Epic.

Fortnite is (or can be) the leading business driver for Google across: 

YouTube (already 100M+ increase in game watch time MAU)

GCP (to shift 130M+ players from AWS and build an anchor tenant in games)

Yeti (Fortnite + Unreal Engine support for all games)

[email continues]

July 16th, 2018, in a reply from Dave Sobota:

As a potential alternative, Phil is proposing we consider approaching Tencent to either (a) buy Epic shares from Tencent to get more control over Epic (unclear how that helps us without a majority share) or (b) join up with Tencent to buy 100% of Epic (and then of course we do a lot of deep commercial things with Epic).

The direct investment route had Google internally proposing to invest ~$2B in exchange for a ~20 percent stake of Epic. Google wrote: “Will require a substantial investment to gain influence.”

The Tencent / controlling interest route sounded very tentative:

The company may be open to a second large strategic investor as a counterweight to Tencent

Tencent may not be willing to sell shares, or may seek to block another strategic investor (investor rights unknown)

Update: Fixed typo and added a line about “Yeti” that I missed copying over.