• 332@feddit.nu
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    1 year ago

    Yeah, people speculated that this was coming.

    Also, why the hell do they own bandcamp, lol.

    • Pxtl@lemmy.caOP
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • elvith@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        Wait… They sell games? I thought, they’d just gift you some every week!

          • zecg@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            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.

            • Fredselfish@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Think my number at moment high 100’s but only way I have been getting games for the last 6 months though.

    • Vordus@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • ryper@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • zecg@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • LiveLM@lemmy.zip
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    1 year ago

    Thank fucking god they’re selling Bandcamp before they had a chance to ruin it🙏

      • Vordus@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • beefcat@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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

    • guacupado@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • ClockworkOtter@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • elscallr@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Godot seeing both Unity and Epic implode in the same month: “now’s the time”

  • edric@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I wonder what this means for bandcamp. It’s one of the only few options where musicians can actually earn from their work.

    • thesmokingman@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • Dandroid@dandroid.app
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      1 year ago

      People are losing their jobs. Their families are going to be in serious distress. I don’t wish layoffs on anyone.

      • Brawler Yukon@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • honey_im_meat_grinding@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • elscallr@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • kiku123@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • Rose@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Epic actually invested in Godot with their MegaGrant. Godot is also available on the Epic store.

          • Ranjeliq@programming.dev
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            1 year ago

            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).

        • Weslee@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          It’s an open source game engine that has received alot exposure since the whole Unity fiasco

        • crius@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • Pxtl@lemmy.caOP
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            1 year ago

            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.

            • crius@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              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.

  • Jaysyn@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    The effects of the SVB bankruptcy are still rippling out.

    Also, I thought Apple owned Bandcamp.

    • IHeartBadCode@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • LetMeEatCake@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • echo64@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      SVB has nothing to do with this, it’s crazy that people think that SVB is a cause and not a symptom.

  • soulfirethewolf@lemdro.id
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    1 year ago

    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.