Epic Games Cutting 870 Jobs, 16 Percent Of Its Workforce, also selling Bandcamp
Epic Games Cutting 870 Jobs, 16 Percent Of Its Workforce, also selling Bandcamp
The company behind Fortnite and the Unreal Engine is also reported to be selling off Bandcamp
TiL Epic had purchased BandCamp
197Permanently Deleted
34
Selling Bandcamp
Thank god, keep your grimy paws off my music, Sweeney.
101I 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.
14Why don't we buy it?
Could this be a kickstarter?
8
Yeah, people speculated that this was coming.
Also, why the hell do they own bandcamp, lol.
75They 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.
3Also, 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.
3A 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.
3
Thank fucking god they're selling Bandcamp before they had a chance to ruin it🙏
57Now it'll go to some private equity vampire who will really ruin it
45It 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.
12
They're also increasing the price of V-Bucks to try to get even more money out of Fortnite players.
43This 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.
1
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.
37Narrator: No dodgy investors... Yet.
20Indeed
0
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).
14
Godot seeing both Unity and Epic implode in the same month: "now's the time"
20I wonder what this means for bandcamp. It’s one of the only few options where musicians can actually earn from their work.
17Like 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.
14
The second good news for Godot today and I'm here for it
7People are losing their jobs. Their families are going to be in serious distress. I don't wish layoffs on anyone.
25Having 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.
1The 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.
1Man, 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.
1
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.
5Didn't they just buy Bandcamp?
4Good thing I'm developing all of my games in Unreal right now.
2Unity has fallen, billions must use blueprints
4
Lol
0Does Lemmy (this community specifically) circlejerk as hard as reddit does when it comes to Epic bad?
-6Yes
17Very yes. I like Lemmy but there's a lot of "corporation bad giv updoot" here.
8That’s because corporation is bad, giv updoot.
8It'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.
0Even if so, Valve is the bigger corporation, so it would make more sense to at least not attack the one that's trying to put a dent in the monopoly.
-1
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?"
1Permanently Deleted
-3if 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.
7I 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…
1
well..Epic is bad cuz corporate.
-3