TiL Epic had purchased BandCamp
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Selling Bandcamp
Thank god, keep your grimy paws off my music, Sweeney.
Monkey’s paw: Google buys it
At the same time, Epic is divesting itself of Bandcamp, a deeply strange acquisition in the first place. It’s being sold to Songtradr.
Not today, monkey’s paw.
Tomorrow: Songtradr joins the Koch Media family
In the not too distant future:
Today we’re announcing we’re ending support for Bandcamp and merging it to YouTube music….
Honestly that sounds fine
Obviously you don’t knis what Bandcamp is.
I might be jaded, but I’d wager that whoever buys it, is going to be worse than having Epic as a rich daddy who is focused on and making money through his core business and doesn’t really know what to do with Bandcamp. Entities that buy it are almost certainly going to squeeze harder at the expense of user experience.
Why don’t we buy it?
Could this be a kickstarter?
Thank fucking god they’re selling Bandcamp before they had a chance to ruin it🙏
Now it’ll go to some private equity vampire who will really ruin it
They’re also increasing the price of V-Bucks to try to get even more money out of Fortnite players.
This is the part that blows my mind. When you have a money-printing machine like Fortnite and you still manage to lose money, maybe it’s the CEO you need to be firing.
The Bandcamp sale is hopefully good news. Songtradr looks like they’re just in the music business and don’t (from their Wikipedia page) have any obviously dodgy investors.
Narrator: No dodgy investors… Yet.
Indeed
They also bought 7digital.com this year, which is a site I sometimes buy MP3s from since they have a better selection of mainstream record-label stuff than Bandcamp (no Amazon MP3s here in Canada).
Godot seeing both Unity and Epic implode in the same month: “now’s the time”
I wonder what this means for bandcamp. It’s one of the only few options where musicians can actually earn from their work.
Like other commenters here, I’m hopeful. Epic owning Bandcamp was pretty scary. They never really answered questions about it and a lot of folks were worried it could have gone the Epic Store route. Epic might honestly have sucked up all the data and sold it off already, though. We don’t know what the future will hold; I feel like no Epic is at worst a neutral position. Songtradr is at least in the music business and isn’t headed by Tim Sweeney.
That’s some… That’s some… Epic layoff.
It’s funny really. They probably could continued growth had Tim Sweeney just swallowed his pride and accepted the 30% commission rate. Instead, the game has a nearly non-existent prominence on mobile because of it.
Didn’t they just buy Bandcamp?
Good thing I’m developing all of my games in Unreal right now.
Unity has fallen, billions must use blueprints
The effects of the SVB bankruptcy are still rippling out.
Also, I thought Apple owned Bandcamp.
I think this might have more to do with the beating that Epic took from Apple in court. The 2021 decision in favor of Apple, of their lawsuit for anti-competitive behavior was upheld this year. That was not cheap to litigate that and was a major loss for Epic.
I think the Bandcamp sell off is a good indicator of all of this. Epic obtained Bandcamp in March 2022, to explicitly have their IAP system integrated into it. Google shut them down and told them they would start collecting the 30% usual due. Epic filed suit and Google gave them an exception for the time being with the agreement that 10% would be held in escrow until the conclusion of the trail. With many of the arguments in the Apple case similar to Google’s case, I’m pretty sure Epic sees the loss coming from a mile away.
All in all, what I think can be drawn from this. Epic made a big bet on “their store” and that’s fading away with mobile devices locking people into a marketplace that is “distinctly not Epic”. While putting such a bet wouldn’t normally kill a company, Epic sextupled down on it and I think how hard they went for “their marketplace” is what’s done them in.
That and the EGS seem to be where Epic funneled all their profits from the height of Fornite. That neither has worked out puts them on shakier ground. How many billions of dollars has been spent on EGS with it being way behind their revenue targets?
As things stand, Epic has very little in the way of a next big revenue source when Fortnite starts to fade as something new takes its place. That (probably) isn’t right around the corner but it will happen eventually. Their bet was on running major digital storefronts; that hasn’t worked out. UE will continue to make good money but not anywhere near enough to sustain the company as it is. UE is simply far smaller than something like FN.
This is likely them realizing this in conjunction with what you said. They need a new big revenue source in the pipeline, since digital storefronts won’t be it. Whatever that next thing is will need lots of money.
SVB has nothing to do with this, it’s crazy that people think that SVB is a cause and not a symptom.
Lol
Does Lemmy (this community specifically) circlejerk as hard as reddit does when it comes to Epic bad?
Yes
Very yes. I like Lemmy but there’s a lot of “corporation bad giv updoot” here.
There’s so few instances of corporations doing actually good things so opinions tend to skew negative. Epic hasn’t been thought of fondly since they started doing those exclusivity deals to try and bring people to their platform rather than making their platform a worthy competitor to Steam.
It’s very rare that those who hate Epic also hate Valve though, so it’s not about standing against a corporation. People just defend what they are used to and Epic disrupts that.
I’ll be the first to say that I only begrudgingly accept Steam exists. However, I avoid using it and vastly prefer GOG due to the DRM-free nature of their store and the offline installers.
Just because the hate on Epic is vocal does not mean that everyone likes the Steam status quo.
Nor does it mean that the hate towards Epic doesn’t have any basis. They did a lot of shit that caused them to have a bad reputation.
GOG has 0.5 to 2% of the market share, so I see no contradiction in my point on the scenario being rare.
You’re presuming the contributors to Lemmy are just the same in their choices of gaming as the broader market.
It doesn’t take that much reading of posts in Lemmy to conclude that it’s heavilly biased towards adults, techies and lefties.
In Statistics you can only make presumptions about a subset of subjects from statistical distribution data from the whole universe of subjects if the subset has been randomly selected, which this one most definitelly hasn’t - if only because of the “Reddit migration” Lemmy is filled with people with a certain kind of mindset (the ones for whom the actions of the Reddit CEO were displeasing enough to make them want to move and who actually had the will to do so) which isn’t at all the average person’s behaviour (the “average” just stayed there) plus even the Reddit population was already not representative of gamers generally (older in general).
The general market share of GOG might give you a hint that here too it’s likely going to have fewer customers than something like Steam, but judging by comments I’ve read here it’s probably more than 2%, at least amongst commenters (no idea about lurkers).
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Why do people always say this as if these forums are some niche group and not a huge spread of the general population?
If you’re seeing multiple communities with a general opinion, maybe it’s “people hate them” instead of “why do all these different groups hate the same thing?”
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if Sweeney ever loses a controlling amount of shares to them
To be clear, he can’t “lose” shares to them. He might willingly sell shares to them (although that’s unlikely as he’s shown no indication of giving anyone else control over the company thus far), but it’s a private company - the shares aren’t just out there for Tencent to buy up and force a takeover.
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I think more likely is he’ll end up giving them 40% of the profits for nothing in return… and so have to lay people off despite turning a profit…
It’s getting pretty tiring on Reddit. You’d think Sweeney were Hitler. I get that Epic’s exclusives were annoying, but they also give us free games every week. The hate is far past justification.
Nah, fuck ‘em for hating on Linux too. If they put as much effort into supporting it as they do to opposing it there’d be a lot more love for Epic.
Opposing it? EOS supports Linux, EAC works on the Deck, and Epic regularly invest in things like Lutris. Sure, there are no native Linux ports on the Epic store, but that’s not been the general direction of the industry either. Proton/Wine can still be used to run the games sold by Epic.
I’d put buying Psyonix (rocket league) and immediately killing Linux support as particularly damning, but Tim Sweeneys dislike of Linux is well known.
And … odd coincidence “payday 2 coming to epic games but drops linux support”
Rocket League also dropped Mac support, which would be perfectly compatible with the store, so you can’t argue it was about Linux. The actual reason was the need to upgrade to DX11.
Payday 2 has no connection to Epic, but it’s common for developers to revisit and update games when releasing on a new platform. For example, the upcoming Steam port of THPS 1+2 even has a new developer behind it, and set to include achievements and potentially other perks.
There are also games like Rust that have dropped native Linux support without any ties to Epic.
Edit: Fixed an improperly formatted link.
well…Epic is bad cuz corporate.
