Tech and ads company Google reportedly looked into acquiring Tencent's stake in Fortnite firm Epic Games.

That's according to documents made public as part of the latter's antitrust lawsuit against the search giant – as spotted by Bloomberg – which say that Google explored buying the portion of the company owned by Chinese tech and entertainment giant Tencent.

Epic claims that this plan was made back in 2018 as a means of stopping it from releasing a version of its hit battle royale title Fortnite on Android that circumvented the Google Play store on mobile devices.

Back in 2012, Epic attracted investment from Tencent to fuel its new service-based games direction. The Chinese firm snapped up 48.4 per cent of Epic's shares.

It's not clear exactly how much of the Fortnite maker Tencent owns presently – or how much its stake is worth – but earlier in 2021 the company was valued at a cool $28.7 billion following another round of investment.

These documents were made public as part of Epic's lawsuit against Google which it filed in August 2020, when the games firm also sued Apple.