- cross-posted to:
- gaming
- music@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- gaming
- music@beehaw.org
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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.
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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?
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!
Lol same my entire Epic library is all the free games I get every Thursday like today.
And there’s like 300 of them. With Steam, I had to buy my way into a Buridan’s donkey position where I don’t play anything because I have too much. My man Sweeney made me jaded for free.
Think my number at moment high 100’s but only way I have been getting games for the last 6 months though.
Wait that’s a good point. I hope I get to keep all my free games.
Also, why the hell do they own bandcamp, lol.
Because a gaming company with a successful battle royale is like a mule with a spinning wheel or something.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Man, Gamers™ get fuckin’ vicious when it comes to things like this that make them click different icons than the ones they like. It’s pretty gross.
Having been through a few myself… it sucks but you plan for it. Technology is rapidly changing. If you’re employed at a tech company you need to plan to be at another I’ve shortly because the companies implode quickly as the technology evolves.
You adapt or you don’t. There’s nothing sad about it, it’s the way it is.
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.
Epic actually invested in Godot with their MegaGrant. Godot is also available on the Epic store.
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Epic also gave money to Lutris, while Epic’s CEO was smearing Linux users on twitter, so I wouldn’t count on Epic’s stance on things and where some of Epic’s money going aligning any time soon. Those megagrants feel very disingenuous to me (doesn’t mean that those money do not help those “underdog” projects, though).
What is Godot?
It’s an open source game engine that has received alot exposure since the whole Unity fiasco
Why is Godot?
No one ever asks how is Godot…
A game engine
Godot is an open source game engine that is incredibly trending among the “hipster” developers community and fanatics of FOSS.
It’s absolutely not even close to the features offered by Unreal Engine or Unity but people that are barely informed are all excited because now an open source project with some serious bugs and limitations “will show them”.
Unless there is a serious rewrite, Godot will never be a valid alternative to the two main commercial engines. And with the fact that it had been recently heavily rewritten to be updated to v4, it is really improbable that it will happen soon.
Unless there is a serious rewrite, Godot will never be a valid alternative to the two main commercial engines
How so? I’ve seen complaints about the C# API and some similar challenges, but nothing show-stopping. Obviously you won’t be making a AAA game in it, but for indies it looks like a decent option.
The dirty secret of software is that any given user-facing OSS application is about 15 years behind the closed-source competitors, but the fact is that most software was good-enough 15 years ago and the industry has spent the last 15 years on cloudifying and A-B testing and GUI revamping and other stuff that isn’t basic functionality.
The thing is, even Indies can look and feel like AAA games (well, the good ones) with something unreal engine for example.
I’m not a fan of Epic by any means but all I’m saying is that they asinine aren’t in the same league while with Unity they could at least be close.
Unity have done a real shitty moves but all this “We’ll do even better without it” attitude that I’m seeing around is either coming from people that just think “shitty move” or really really really naive developers.
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.
Lol
