Literally just got this email:
Honestly bewildering. I have no idea how this relates to games or the “game dev stack”. For anyone who doesn’t know, Bandcamp is a service for selling music used by indie artists, similar to itch.io.
They also bought Harmonix, could be some synergy at play there by allowing people to buy indie music right into a Rock Band 'em Up
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Well, I don’t know how weta (for example) relates to games, or anything. Why does it have to relate specifically, to games? These companies like Unity or Epic attempt to serve all and any needs from publishing to running their own stores, serving all manner of industries.
The only surprise is your surprise.
Also it is pretty common to buy middleware or services nowadays to prevent these resources from being bought by competitors. Often a competitor will buy a service and cancel it. Mixamo was fun while it lasted.
Maybe they are taking a page out of the Unity playbook and moving into new areas of “generating creative works”…
Games? No, but Epic has made a lot of in-roads into film production with their realtime rendering capabilities, so they’re probably branching heavily off of that.
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Well, as long as things don’t change for the worse for artists, who cares. It’s not necessarily related to games and we all know Epic by now. Though, I’d laugh if UT soon announces that they have acquired Soundcloud in response to that.
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My games need music. I am guessing epic is going to make it easier to get music into my games. Good.
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Massive 3d content creation tools and pipeline, city/terrain/creature/mob generation and management. VFX tools and pipeline. Virtually everything they do relates to modern game development.
But, Bandcamp is a store. Not even a music dev tool. Presumably it will be tied to connecting music creators to game developers? Maybe? It does seem strange. Unless Epic is going the Amazon route and moving toward to publishing all kinds of media.
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Yeah iunno what to think about this.
Bandcamp is amazing as is. Both for music creators and lovers of music (such as myself). I just hope they don’t ruin it in any form.
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From the verge article:
“An Epic blog post says Bandcamp will play “an important role in Epic’s vision to build out a creator marketplace ecosystem for content, technology, games, art, music and more.””
So looks like they have plans to operate a big or multiple online stores for a range of content. They want to sell more than just games it sounds like, after dipping their feet in with the epic store.
Dont see how, TBH. It’d be like trying to tie iTunes to iOS development. Bandcamp is a sales platform for musicians etc (and labels) to sell music/audio directly to their audience. But its not a distributor (like eg CDBaby) It doesnt involve itself in the usage rights of that music at all, just the storefront.
Even if they started offering that sort of distribution service, its not a given that all the artists and labels on Bandcamp would want to use that; if they already have a need for distribution, they almost certainly already have a distributor.
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Yeah, in my case it’s CDBaby, who offers support for basically all the common platforms (Spotify, Youtube Music, iTunes, etc.). Bandcamp is in addition. If I have to choose between them as distributors…Bandcamp loses out.
I feel like this is a form of “shopping therapy” for big corporations.
Instead of just getting a new t-shirt or a really expensive smart scale to feel good for a little while, the corporate version is “hmm, I have some extra cash and all these companies are for sale! I think Weta would look great in our bathroom, ooh and Bandcamp will go great with my new outfit, let me check if it comes in blue”
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Love Bandcamp; by far the best online platform for buying something from an independent/small band where a decent chunk of the money goes to the artist. Hopefully they will keep doing Bandcamp Fridays (Where all BC waive any rev share and ALL money goes to the artist/label!)
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They might just do that for certain things. Regardless for what engine or what purpose the fees may be waived for, the important part is people get to rock out on their terms. I love that kind of initiative. Publishing a thing need not be all or nothing in the verse to come.
I wonder if this is a pr move in trying to battle stores / increase engine usage.
from the notice
“Hey, look! We are the good guys! Boo to all those other companies that want to take your money.”
Next they’ll tell us they want to democratize game development or something.
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Everything is a PR move.
But at least these guys are saying something indies would want to hear, IMO.
From other companies my response is, “this is definitely BS.” To Epic it is, “is this BS?”
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Welp…it begins.
I really don’t like the idea of access to my art suffering due to Epic’s behavior.
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I mean, you can directly publish your music to Google Play Music (or use one of the many services that autopublish your music to all major outlets).
Also the removal of Bandcamp’s App from Google Play has been coming since 2020, when Google Play changed its policy.
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