This feels like a potential last step of true music ownership and that makes me incredibly sad.
That being said if anyone knows of any place to buy flacs of music with great selection would love to know (especially for Japanese music which I generally have to import, thankfully they love CDs).
People concerned over the "Exclusivity deals" on the game store end aren't looking at the "Developer" acquisitions which have rarely lead to the kinds of ends that, say, Google's Aquisitions have.
I wouldn't be surprised if the acquisition is to provide royalty free music to the games industry via Unreal Engine, as was the case for Quixel, but none of this is really good news for artists trying to make money unless Bandcamp plans to pay the artists out of their own pocket for a royalty free side.
All of that is speculation of course, we'll see where it goes. It's just a weird acquisition if it's not for integration I feel.
Bandcamp was already profitable and has been for years. The pandemic dramatically increased their sales. They were doing fine.
Why did they need an exit?
That is the real flaw of SV thinking: that simply being a profitable, going concern is somehow inadequate. The result is monopoly accretion as small companies are repeatedly swallowed up by bigger ones.
I get it: venture capitalists are interested in the most efficient possible way to loot the economy, and funding non-viable startups until they're so overhyped that some other idiot buys the over-inflated toxic asset from them before it blows is a great way to do that.
Of course speaking out against VC and startup culture on Hacker News is going to get me downvoted to oblivion, so go ahead and mash that down arrow. Don't forget to dislike and unsubscribe!
Epic lies. It is what they do. They are the epitome of a dangerous megacorp.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/15/21438194/rocket-league-fr...
Would be interesting to think of acquisitions where this wasn't the case. The only one that jumps to mind is Zappos.
Bleep offers FLAC (even 24 bit WAV).
It's mostly alternative and electronica stuff though. It was founded by Warp records (Aphex Twin, Autreche, Boards of Canada, etc) but it now sells stuff for other labels as well.
Bandcamp has no cap on redownloading my library, and a decent mobile app for the stuff I don't keep stored on my devices.
Bandcamp isn't a perfect platform (they finally added a volume slider after a decade+), but they were a great solution to buying and releasing music for me since the birth of Bandcamp.
This is a play to get content and direct relationships with producers, I don't think they will change the business model.
That said, I didn't spend nearly as much money there because Bandcamp showed a lot more evidence that they cared about ethics and getting money directly to artists. I have no idea how money works with something like 7digital, but I assume it doesn't pay artists as well.
Albums disappear all the time and never return, your downloads from your library break when that happens too. So be like me, download immediately and back it up.
I still use 7digital bc it's easier to actually download the mp3/flac, especially on mobile, without a 3rd party app (like Amazon) that makes you download one song at a time (as opposed to a zip of an album)
But it's a rotting, decaying place where new music doesn't get added.
I listen to mostly older shit. So no big deal for me. For now.
Want an example? Here's Deezer:
https://www.deezer.com/search/%22Arrows%20in%20the%20Gale%22...
Here's 7digital:
https://no.7digital.com/search?q=Arrows%20in%20the%20Gale
I probably can't post more links without getting auto-hidden by HN, but just try the search elsewhere too. Also try the album titles "Fresh Fruit", "I'm Looking for an Angel", "Day Dawn" or "My Car Sounds".
That is one spammer. He releases 300+ albums at once, several times per months, to virtually all streaming services. They all have the same title, and the same generic album art, often a filtered stock image. They're officially "compilation albums". He has been doing this for about a decade as far as I can tell. He uses a different made-up label each time. If you blindly search up any song by one of the classic artists he targets, likely you will get one of his "compilations", and he will get money for every play.
But Spotify is different. Those Echo Nest people have a special hatred of spammers, they kicked him out ages ago.
For buying FLACs of Japanese music, I'm a satisfied Ototoy[0] user, though I'm not sure if people outside Japan can create an account.
https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/v12/ (scroll down).
It's actually possible to download the files but the price is fixed and it seems to be track by track.
So it looks more like a replacement for Spotify to me.
It doesn't have a ton of music currently, but the payout to musicians is very good, so it could become more popular in the future.
https://www.junodownload.com/labels/Ruff+And+Tuff+Recordings...
Obviously this is all speculation, bandcamp could continue on as it has been for the conceivable future, but I am less pleased about that future than I was before I saw this news.
And yet they just don't seem to have any interest in it.
same here. last week i decided to not renew my spotify subscription for the first time in 10 years and bought some of my favourite albums on bandcamp. sigh
It’s sad to see Bandcamp go. Because in tech an acquisition means loss of that independence.
However, even if I am unable to invest in them I see nothing wrong about my expressing discomfort over someone else buying them. I have seen nothing as well that they needed cash to continue operations.
* FLAC or similar, I want this to be a lossless preservation of what was on the best-available source.
* No DRM. No mandated player. Just let me download a dang file.
* "Real" flac: this is technically already covered under the first bullet, but I call it out because I've seen it happen before: if I can open the flac in audacity and see it's obviously just a re-encode of a lossy format that clips the upper and lower frequency ranges off, that's a smell and I don't like it. (I know, most people can't tell etc, but this is less for listening purposes and more for archival purposes).
* Supports the artist!
Now, I'll admit, when push comes to shove, I drop the last bullet point first. So previously, my source for music was:
1. CD's (and I would follow What's guide for making Perfect Flacs)
2. What
But then what shut down and I lost my main music discovery mechanism. Enter bandcamp! Now I've been very happy with:
1. Bandcamp (I buy CDs because I like the artwork and they're cool).
2. CD's (+ Perfect Flac ripping guide still)
Now I'm not sure what to do. Epic has really soured me on their brand already, and I already boycott their launcher and any EGS exclusives. I guess I have to find some other way to get stuff now.
So you can't be sure if you're looking at a reencoding or a lossy file or not.
Having what is practically a DC offset in your signal doesn't do anyone any good.
There are also full range mp3s, since iTunes by default doesn't apply a hard 20khz lowpass like LAME does.
I mean, why not continue doing what you are doing until the thing that you like actually goes to shit?
IDK why "protesting a launcher" means disassociating with every single thing a company does. Kind of hard to avoid every single Unreal Engine game, or Blender/Godot or any other company/game they gave no-strings grants to. Or games you played already but are on EGS when they get a PC port.
Edit: for one thing, anyone who pops up with a "bandcamp replacement" right now is going to have a very difficult time arguing that their replacement is actually better as long as bandcamp is still exactly the same thing they were emulating.
The only gambling there was in Fortnite was in the paid version of the game that nobody really played anyway. The game that is actually popular doesn't have it.
With Plex, you may own the media, but Plex, Inc. owns the authentication. You're not allowed to access the service running on your own hardware unless you can log in with a Plex account.
Also: losing What was indeed a massive blow, but there are others still carrying that torch...
You can still set up local login for Plex to avoid their auth on your own network or list of allowed IPs. It's not 100% what people want, but it's something.
Just FYI there's sites that take in What refugees
Also FTR I'm a heavy Bandcamp user and I'm disappointed by this acquisition.
I really don't think it's hoarding - the overall data sizes here are small (relative to the fact that a 12TB WD Red is 250-300 dollars on amazon) and it's not like I spend my nights scouring ebay for this stuff. I just make sure I get best-available media while it's still widely and easily available.
Some of it is also that I just don't trust the current system to archive media. Sure, most popular things will be fine. But there's a lot of music that's not quite underground but also isn't popular and I wouldn't be surprised if it became hard to get ahold of the quality standards I have in 10-20 years.
Good tip for people on the music side, and something to suggest to them:
1. Set up but do not publish your Bandcamp Subscriptions
2. Add all your music to it
3. Now it's all downloadable in your own user-side Bandcamp library. Check the format: FLAC is best.
Assuming not everyone holds on to masters once they're uploaded.
I had an artist take "Album 1", "Album 2", "Album 3", and "Album 4", which I purchased through a whole-discography purchase, and merge them into "Album 1-4". It turns out I was able to download the originals anyways.
Maybe at least they'll add some kind of "Now Playing" feature in Fortnite, that would probably be fun for some people.
I am with you. One of the biggest draws for me was these what you have described. Their website experience was straightforward and honest.
They are now being acquired by a company that is the complete opposite. We won't have to wait long for Epic's dark patterns and policies to creep into a once great marketplace.
40% of which will be owned by Tencent, possibly more in the future based on the whims of Tim Sweeney and the performance of Epic's primary business (Video Games).
Really unfortunate to see an independent source for music become part of a huge conglomerate.
> I’m the controlling shareholder in Epic Games, and have been since 1991. We have a number of outside investors now. Tencent is the largest. All of Epic’s investors our friends and partners. None can dictate decisions to Epic. None have access to Epic customer data.
> Tencent is a Chinese company founded in 1998. CEO Pony Ma and the other co-founders played a lot of Unreal Tournament back then, and visited Epic in the early 2000’s. In 2012 Epic was looking to move to online games, and we invited Tencent in as an investor to help us.
> I’ve never regretted it, and the recent anti-China rage doesn’t change that even slightly, as its completely unfounded. Epic has only had positive interactions with Tencent at all levels.
> All of Epic’s big decisions are made here in the USA and as CEO I’m 100% responsible for them. I’m grateful for everyone who has spoken in support. I also read and respectfully consider all dissenting arguments of fact and principle. Just please keep it real.
https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/111396399928729190...
Although I completely agree with you that it's a shame to see yet another indie source get swallowed up by a big corporation.
> Although I completely agree with you that it's a shame to see yet another indie source get swallowed up by a big corporation.
For the record, I don't think that Tencent is any more evil than Disney, Sony, or Microsoft in this regard.
I'm more than willing to accept that I'm being naive. All I ask is some actual evidence of this influence/bias.
I know it's hip to be cynical and all, but seriously. Even if he were so motivated by money, could anyone even put together a payout that'd be better than "continue to watch the Steam Store print money, beholden to no one because Valve is a privately-held company held by you"?
I mean, thats many of the comments about this news, despite Epic/Tencent historally ringing true to their words.
>could anyone even put together a payout that'd be better than "continue to watch the Steam Store print money, beholden to no one because Valve is a privately-held company held by you"?
Sure. It's just a middleman storefront, and there are trillionaire tech companies right now (and more in the future). Maybe Gabe leverages Valve and jumps to a whole other industry when he tires of games. Maybe he just sells it all off and turns that into assets to will off (better than giving family a company they can't manage).
Nothing is certain and much larger internet darlings have been turned agaisnt faster.
I can’t imagine anyone wanting to work for or be part of Epic, so that’s my assumption of gobs of cash.
creators of one of the two largest third party game engines? A chance for your product to be integrated in a tool used by game studios throughout the world? You really can't imagine any reason past the monetary to work with Epic?
It’s nice to be a programmer and have options but I wouldn’t work with a company that makes such invasive software.
Licensing As A Service is probably a neat thing if it can be done at scale on par with the Unreal Engine Marketplace. But a lot of it boils down to "imagine if we could make IP law straightforward" which is somewhat of a moonshot.
Also could be a source of creative content to generate NFTs, maybe even tie that to licensing of music used in game livestreams.
but "fortnite" by epic already had concert/online experiences. They've been pretty fun. Maybe getting band camp allows them access to artists they didn't have before?
https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/fort-nite-concert-seri...
bandcamp, as a business that just does a thing very well and fairly, is never going to become as big as Google or Facebook.
so, founder/VC/board now require it to be bought out for a huge multiple of revenue and be stripped for parts.
There's something about Bandcamp that seems exactly right. It's an open, fair and creative way to discover and publish music, that is really distinct from the rest of the music business.
I'm struggling to see how that fits into a gigantic video game company. If it has to pull in so much money that it "moves the needle" at Epic at all, I don't see how it can remain anything close to what it is today.
An ecosystem thrives by having a variety of organisms of different species and sizes interacting. The tech business ecosystem increasingly looks more like a giant pasture of uniform grass being grazed by half a dozen aging tumorous cows.
For what it's worth, Panic appears to be one of those smaller indie developers similar to say Bare Bones Software or the Omni Group. I think those are sustainable non-startup software shops that can exist and persist on their own.
I fell behind on downloading all of my 426 purchases on bandcamp, but now I feel a strong desire to catch up.
Creators of Unreal Engine, one of the two de facto 3rd party game engines in the industry, created way back in the 90's. You very likely played some game or 6 that was made using it. Also the developers of several games themselves like Gears of War, Unreal Tournament, Infinity Blade, and Bulletstorm.
But I guess more recently people would call them "The creators of Fortnite", that free to play battle royale that usurped PUBG as "the face" of the genre. They also have a PC game store that is relatively recent and under some ire from consumers for reasons that'd take a whole essay to fully explain.
As a middleman between games and developers, the reasons to purchase a music vendor is numerous. Time will tell what they do with it, but most of their previous aquisitions are hands-off.
> but most of their previous aquisitions are hands-off
Thanks.
Given the immediate negative reactions that people have to this news (see the countless "what is a bandcamp alternative?" posts going around right now), I wonder how it will impact one of Bandcamp's most important assets: their Daily blog. From what I can tell, the blog posts are largely written by independent music journalists. The topics are all over the place (in a good way), and they are fun, personal ways to discover music. Will we see some of these core writers leave (on their own volition)? Likewise, will the direction of what is highlighted in these posts shift to align with other Epic assets?
On the technical end, there are plenty of legitimate complaints about Bandcamp's app. I would imagine Epic = more resources for the app, for better or for worse.
And this is despite the vast majority of my Epic game library being free (literally hundreds of games) or deeply discounted — the storefront is really that bad. For example, when AWS went down a couple months ago, both the store app was non-functional. Apparently, the game store depends on S3 for game thumbnails and other metadata, and its caching is...non-optimal. I think I could've accessed my games by running their executables directly from file explorer. But 4 years in, this kind of slapped together design decision — on top of EGS still being bare bones compared to Steam — seems indicative of poor management.
Obviously, Bandcamp as a relatively mature storefront is not in the same situation. And remaining alive and sustainable probably outweighs what negatives Epic might bring as owner.
I don't see that as some kind of dealbreaker. Just an unideal choice for a consumer who may want everything to be offline and cached. The storefront is very likely some electron wrappper for their website, so I wouldn't be too surprised if their thumbnails were stored on some other server. Steam isn't too different in regards to that architecture (just not using AWS, since they preceeded that).
Games are available offline as of some year+ ago so that outage should not have affected your ability to run games.
Oh, and there's no "open in app" feature on the site, or a "copy URL" feature in the app.
Otherwise, I share the sentiment that Bandcamp itself is (was) a great place to buy indie music in high quality, and that this feels like the beginning of the end.
From a dev perspective of someone who's worked with several Epic tools I'm not immediately worried about what seems to be more of a technical acquisition. Historically they do seem to actually leave their subsidaries hand-off, integrating their tech into Unreal instead of absorbing it entirely. I imagine the extend of the ramifications here include some way to expand Unreal's Asset store to include music or SFX (which artists can opt into offering on the asset store).
Soundcloud doesn't count because I get at least one spammer interacting with my tracks every single time I upload something. It's got to the point that I've started only uploading things secretly and sharing the private links with the people who will actually listen to the music.
Edit: I'm gonna experiment with self-hosting on Funkwhale. We'll see how that goes.
big new release coming this month with artist-side album drafting and merch features
I'm not affiliated, but I've known it for a while. It was known as IndieTorrent back then.
At the moment, I’m heartbroken because of this. I’ve been using Bandcamp for a very long time now and it has been the single best thing to happen to independent music and musicians in the modern age. For me, one of its best features was the fact that it barely changed in all that time. It seemingly never chased the metrics that drive similar platforms to reinvent themselves constantly, so it’s always been a reliable, predictable partner. It’s the only product like it that I can think of where I can say that I truly believe that our interests are (were) aligned.
Now? It seems like a matter of time until their flashy front-end revamp, their new profit share agreement, a DRM option, a proprietary music player to compete with Spotify. I’m going to hope that their commitment to not changing dramatically holds true, but almost every acquisition starts with an email like this, so I’m not holding my breath.
And one of the worst parts, Bandcamp’s dominance is so thorough and its users so loyal that I’m unaware of a true competitor in their space. I’m not sure what I’d do if they did get progressively crappier.
Maybe Epic's strategy is to fight Apple/Steam (Marketplace monopolies more generally)?
They're already fighting Apple/Steam w/ gaming, maybe they're looking to have a music store already. I think undercutting fees charged by either could be a big win in their eyes.
It’s good that someone is fighting Apple and Steam, but I wish some better company would enter the fight. As it is now, I’d be sad if Epic won.
I’m sure bandcamp received a huge amount of customer support messages about this. It’s confusing to most people.
Amazon is a bookstore.
Epic sees Steam and Apple (and Amazon) and knows that the platform is the chokepoint where all the money is.
It's also an easy way to to procure licensing to sell music content in games. I'd be interested to know why they passed up others like SoundCloud.
As for SoundCloud, either they didn't come to terms for whatever reason, or they didn't try to begin with if marketing considerations favor BP.
Fortnite and other games are really just Unreal Engine advertisement vessels that got successful in their own right and now serve that purpose plus making lots of money on their own.
If they DIDNT see people who bought music as consumers, they'd be shut down instead of acquired. It's still a business, not a charity case. It costs money to host music and pay the payment processors for the ability to let people use credit cards.
People who want some truly decentralized form of music hosting/publishing would be better off going back to the limewire dys than expecting a steady, supported website provide all the expected niceties.
For whatever you have in mind, the question was basically whether you see the users as the owners. I thought it is a misleading question because it is riffing on a legal notion of property and possession, without clearly characterising that property, leaving open any illegal aspect to be pointed out if that was your moral basis of the argument. And indeed, one could attempt a hyperbolic retort in which it should be definitely illegal, say, to change a running system. Or how is leninist marxism for a debatable mindset. Understandably you have rejected that debate. Of course the users are an integral part of the platform, and it's a consequential facet of the culture that some are already feeling sold-out.
Eventually it's kind of subjective, when everyone values the entity differently.
I respect your long experience moderating HN, so asking mostly with the intent enrich my own intuition. Not a rhetorical question.
You're right to reference HN's 'original source' rule ("Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), because this is an exception to it. The reason we have exceptions is that there's a higher organizing principle on HN, namely that we're trying to optimize the site for curiosity [2]. Optimizing means that when there's a conflict between that rule and any other rule, the curiosity rule wins.
Funnily enough the curiosity rule is an instance of itself because it often produces decisions that are counterintuitive, yet at the same time are surprisingly clear. This case is one of the clear ones—it's obvious that corporate press releases don't serve curiosity, and in fact they're largely intended to smooth away anything that people would be curious about.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
it's all about CYA. Better to be "smarm" than create any opening for a legal storm that ruins the entire acquisition, or tanks any public shares from the news.
I'm still not too sure if the "curiosity" rule applies to this new link, however. Half the article is just quoting the source and another 40% just quoting the CEO's on how happy and great the oppurtunity is. Not much real analysis or introspection unless the audience had no idea what a Bandcamp is.
That's unfortunately better than 80% of modern jounralism, but I digress.
I would have, at face value, considered the acquisition a bit odd given Epic's primary product.
I wonder if there is a directory if beloved companies whose quality goes down after a buyout.
This past weekend, I was lamenting with a friend about how two US craft beer breweries we loved were bought out, and how they stopped producing their interesting niche beers in favor of more profitable ones. Their restaurant menus got bland too.
I like it because its a simple and focused hub for artists and fans. The social interaction of the site fells like a perfect balance of presence and connection without any noise. You can see who purchased an album and leave an album review but unable to directly message users. User profiles are simply their collection and a 400 character bio that can contain links. Another plus is the simple web design they employ gives access to the mp3 if you scrape the album page. As a plan 9 user without a modern browser this made it easy to play the music by writing a script that scraped the album page for the mp3 links and fed those into play(1) creating a simple bandcamp player.
Epic will bring nothing good to the service.
I also like the way they handled payments to artists, I'm not sure if they still do it this way, but back then your first 9 payments would go directly to your paypal, and the 10th would go to theirs. And they would balance it out to keep it where they only took %10.
I've bought plenty of single tracks from albums. A few of them as recently as this past weekend.
If an album has a free song or single, you cannot add the free song to your library unless you purchase the whole album. Even if you are allowed to purchase individual songs on the album.
Say all you want about the freedom and quasi-independence of self-publishing to the various streaming corporations, etc., but for years now, the underground scene has thrived on and been virtually exclusively supported by Bandcamp.
It's like every independent artist in the world just got signed to a major corporate label all at once, minus the benefits to the artists. I recognize that's hyperbolic, but fuck me, I feel physically sick over this.
I think it may be possible to build the marketplace in a purely FOSS-y way, but it would be illegal to operate it with the wrong configuration values. I'm thinking in particular about the accounting functions, such as earmarking x% of each sale for royalties, and ensuring they go to/from the correct bank accounts.
In other words, one could plausibly release the code as FOSS, but the interface would depend on a set of corporate entities that are configured a particular way, so it would be of limited value to the median person.
It would definitely lower the barrier to entry for people to fork the business, though, which is probably a good thing for the median person.
---
I'd also be down to contribute as an engineer, if such a project already exists with momentum or if somebody wants to start it!
I hate this. Why does everything need to roll up into other companies. I don't want anything Epic is bringing to the table, and every interaction they've had with open platforms as a business has been negative as far as I can see.
I hate how much consolidation is going on right now.
I’ve really enjoying going into their record store / small intimate venu in Oakland, CA.
- They used to be really into blockchain / smart contracts: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/may/25/resonate-spoti...
- Looking at their forum now, they say that they are not currently using or planning to use blockchains, but it seems like their founders aren't actually opposed to it, so I'm not sure they'll be able to hold the line against it: https://community.resonate.is/t/the-unreasonable-ecological-...
They have a lot of discussion of how they'd like to try to achieve the effects of NFTs without actually using blockchain tech, which, uh... feels like flirting with disaster to me. Seems like they don't quite get the core issues and are in love with flashy technology and complex financial structures.
> how they'd like to try to achieve the effects of NFTs without actually using blockchain tech, which, uh... feels like flirting with disaster to me
To be fair, the "you need to pay for a license to have your otherwise unassociated digital music file be legal" copyright situation is the bizarre NFT-like thing that we all take for granted.
> no blockchain or such in the works; previous experiments in 2018 hurt the co-op far more than they helped it.
https://social.coop/@hakanto/107889107767011612
So that's cheering!
I'd be disappointed if apple had made the purchase, though it would be less out of left field.
Is "good enough" compatible with "capitalism"? Even ignoring the money aspect of things; you mention the website getting worse but I'm not sure the website has fundamentally changed (for better or worse) in a decade. Their iOS app isn't even compatible with ipads, it's locked to a phone aspect ratio with massive black bars surrounding it. Yet one could make the argument that things were "good enough" tech wise. Bandcamp (in my opinion) was a product/company that was good enough. But there's doesn't seem to be societal incentives to keep companies like that around in today's world... or maybe you just don't hear about them lol
Hope that explains it a bit. I'm quite sad and pessimistic about this. We'll see how well our reactions fare in about 2-3 years.
They ditched the Linux version of Rocket League. That counts as a blown acquisition to me.
Somebody breaks into my house and tracks mud all over the floor, and the response is, "well, would you rather they killed your dog? It could have been worse."
what all these "disappointed commenters" wanted was for Bandcamp to continue to provide an excellent service, charging enough to stay in business and grow at a reasonable rate while allowing artists, who did the vast vast vast vast majority of the effort represtented by each sale, to profit and - unironically - connect with fans.
peolpe wanted bandcamp not to give in to uber-capitalism and expect them to fight an uphill battle against spotify and the likes. That is a bit much to ask for in my view. They are forced to move towards streaming. What if pioneer comes up with a seamless spotify integration tomorrow? Usb ports would quickly become a rarity on dj equipment. i get that you like to „own“ your music and have it on your hd- but you also expect to be able to re-download things if you loose your files, right? so you are basically expecting bandcamp not to change in the future and that is out of touch with reality.
The brand name now has a ton of cachet — I hope it continues with the acquisition.
I can see Epic building off the infrastructure there for games and in-game collectibles (of which your vinyls are now a part)
This appears to be the first company they are acquiring that is outside of the video game industry. This may start a new era for Epic Games. I wonder what direction they are going to take? I'd guess a new player in the multi-media field, but I really dont know.
ArtStation also falls outside the core videogame industry and would seem to be similar to Bandcamp, insofar as its a two way marketplace connecting artists with fans.
That's your opportunity
They already try to own the entire pipeline for 3D creation, not just for games but anything 3D.
They don't see Fortnite as a game, but as a platform (Errant Signal had a good essay on that topic two years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNukmNDq60Q) and it's only been more visible ever since, acquiring key tools like Sketchfab, RealityCapture, Quixel, and Artstation.
Now if they can finally make the Android app a decent music player I'll revise my judgment :)
As the lyrics of a contemporary classic goes, "20,000 years of this... 7 more to go."
“I’m excited to announce that Bandcamp is joining Epic Games, who you may know as the makers of Fortnite and Unreal Engine, and _champions for a fair and open Internet._”
So how do 3D artists go about designing and selling skins to Fortnight players without giving Epic a cut?
Someone should get started on a viable alternative. Is it possible to yield a mvp over a couple of weekends? :P
Wonder what the future holds with this acquisition.
Start with the assumption; mp3s are free to create and copy, and there is no point in pretending that this isn't simply how it is, and should be considered a universally good thing. Even streaming a song a second time is stupid.
Now that we've accepted this, how can we collectively figure out some way for me to send money to my favorite artists so they keep doing their thing?
(And I say this as someone who does fairly regularly pay for digital downloads.)
I'm not sure it exactly fits your ideal, but it's closer than anything else I've seen to how I'd like it to work.
I don't care about "personal rewards", but I do care that my contribution makes a tangible difference to what the artist might be able to do. Basically, if they're already doing great, I won't be gilding their lilies, no matter how much I love them.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bandcamper/nafpaeh...
I've spent thousands of dollars on Bandcamp. This makes me really, really sad.
Another option I just came across is https://codeberg.org/simonrepp/faircamp which sets out to be an open source Bandcamp clone, conveniently enough. It does appear to have payment options, but I'm unsure whether they're actually functional since I haven't tried it myself yet (but I plan to).
This could probably be avoided by using different strategies. For instance, if Bandcamp was an NGO of some sort, or has a social contract attached to it, etc. it could have terms for not being acquired.
You, capitalism. Again.
