- cross-posted to:
- gaming@lemmy.ml
- music@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- gaming@lemmy.ml
- music@beehaw.org
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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
It went to Songtradr, who are mostly a music licencing company. So I’m guessing that at least initially things are going to stay the same but that musicians are going to get nagged into letting Songtradr put their stuff up on their big licencing store. And then enshittification, because that’s how absolutely everything is going.
as of right now Songtradr is still run by actual musicians so it probably won’t be so bad
but that could always change down the road
Selling Bandcamp
Thank god, keep your grimy paws off my music, Sweeney.
Monkey’s paw: Google buys it
In the not too distant future:
Today we’re announcing we’re ending support for Bandcamp and merging it to YouTube music….
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
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.
Yeah, people speculated that this was coming.
Also, why the hell do they own bandcamp, lol.
I dunno, company that sells digital content for young people buys company that sells other digital content for young people. I can see the synergy there. Epic Games Store and Bandcamp aren’t that far apart.
Wait… They sell games? I thought, they’d just gift you some every week!
A good reason would have been potential “synergies” with Harmonix, which they also own, but I don’t recall ever seeing anything about that. Collaboration between the company that sells music and the company that makes music games seems like a no-brainer to me.
They wanted to use it to sell music licences for games and media production and the like. But it never really worked out, so they’ve sold it to a company that already actually knows how to do that.
Didn’t they just buy Bandcamp?
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.
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.
The second good news for Godot today and I’m here for it
People are losing their jobs. Their families are going to be in serious distress. I don’t wish layoffs on anyone.
The reason they’re going through layoffs is because they hired unsustainably and chose to do layoffs instead of reducing salaries. This is something that is far more often avoided with democratically owned and community driven projects like Godot, or even better, worker cooperatives and unionised workplaces, where e.g. Mandrogon chose to be more careful, and unionised auto-workers in Germany chose a temporary pay-cut during a recession to avoid having to fire people.
I’m not happy that these people got fired, but there’s a systemic problem here and Godot and other democratic structures of ownership help to alleviate that. Which is related to the first bit of good news today: Brackeys, the de-facto Unity YouTuber with a direct line of communications to Unity who retired 3 years ago - curiously 1 day after Unity went public through an IPO - rose from his grave to champion democratic ownership and is now learning Godot.
How does this help Godot?
I guess that since Epic owns Unreal Engine that bad news for Epic means good news for Godot?
I don’t think that Epic is going to want to divest from Unreal considering how much money it makes.
I also don’t think that it’s a zero-sum game. As a developer I want Unreal (and Unity) to be great so it creates more competition. Unreal has led the way in a lot of cool gaming tech that Godot is picking up.
What is Godot?
Why is Godot?
Does Lemmy (this community specifically) circlejerk as hard as reddit does when it comes to Epic bad?
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?”
Very yes. I like Lemmy but there’s a lot of “corporation bad giv updoot” here.
That’s because corporation is bad, giv updoot.
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 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.
I by no means have a raging hate-boner for Epic or anything, but they’ve definitely done enough to irritate me to the point where I haven’t even bothered with the store for the free games.
It started off poorly with the store launching in such a bad state that it would’ve failed the HTML class I took in high school (it didn’t even have a cart. How can you launch a shopping site without even having the ability for people to buy more than one item at a time? I learned how to program that in 2007!) and it went downhill from there with stuff like the exclusivity deals and that sale they did where they marked 30% off on games that hadn’t even released yet, without even telling the developers or asking permission. Then they’ve rushed to embrace pretty muchthing I’ve praised Valve for refusing to deal with, from NFT games to AI that may or may not be violating copyright laws with the stuff making up the learning databases.
Plenty to criticise, but I’m getting tired of watching them try to shove their foot back into their mouth.
well…Epic is bad cuz corporate.
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.
