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Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

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Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#371

Post by Talanes »

charcircuit wrote: post #293
BaseballPhysics wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because the people who like to start new companies and take lots of risks generally tend to not like running stable businesses and dealing with FP&A managers, lawyers, compliance and tax experts ... in SV/the tech industry. That's kinda my entire point. Stealing someone else's analogy: If you went to a bank to get a small business loan to open up a coffee shop, and you told them "Yeah, I'm hoping to take a bunch of…

You won't get much money selling a small coffee shop which is why it won't work. There is a small upper bound to what you can possibly be worth.

The more accurate to life version of that sale is "I'm going to open a small regional coffee chain and then sell it to JAB Holding Company"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JAB_Holding_Company

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#372

Post by efficax »

merlincorey wrote: post #129
efficax wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Staff moves at that level are a lot different than your average joe, huge paychecks involved and lots of insulation from the product org

Are you suggesting the primary reason SPJ moved to Epic Games is because they offered him more money than Microsoft? Reading the message from SPJ[0] seems to indicate he is excited for the people and projects he will be working on as well as being given the freedom to continue working on education, functional programming research, and continuing to work in the Haskell ecosystem. Of course large amounts of money are i…

That's what I mean by insulation. Bagging a "famous" engineer is a political and PR move and they get a lot of freedom to define the role, something that most of us can't do

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#373

Post by mkr-hn »

tomcatfish wrote: post #364
zormino wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That already happens with Bandcamp. If the artist removes a song/album, you have no way of downloading it again even if you've purchased it. You only get a license to download the music while it's still available on the website. I've lost a few tracks/albums this way, thankfully I had local copies already.

I haven't had this problem, unless artists can do something that looks identical to this on the face. 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.

It's definitely possible. Bandcamp will even warn you before deleting something.

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#374

Post by Talanes »

pketh wrote: post #223
Invictus0 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SV is not a homogeneous thought-entity. Maybe the founders were tired of running it or wanted to move on to do something else. Businesses get bought and sold all the time and don't need to be a lifetime commitment for the founder (it would still get sold or shutdown at that point anyway).

You make a good point, but I wonder what the real world business equivalent of this is? Is it the destiny of every successful café to become acquired by Starbucks one day? (assuming there's not a better comparison I should be thinking of)

>Is it the destiny of every successful café to become acquired by Starbucks one day?

Almost, but it's these guys:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JAB_Holding_Company

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#375

Post by hamburglar »

Apocryphon wrote: post #200
heleninboodler wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The employees who traded compensation for equity probably don't agree. Bandcamp's success is built partially on this trade and at some point it needs to pay off for them. I suppose they could stay private forever and give out profit-sharing bonuses, but I think people go into this expecting an exit.

Did Bandcamp offer employee equity?

Yes, they did.

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#377

Post by Apocryphon »

munificent wrote: post #368
Apocryphon wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone's forgotten that monocultures are bad. 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.

Many companies can exist and persist on their own until a behemoth decides they shouldn't. It's not about "can this business get enough users to be profitable?" it's about "will some huge corporation decide to put them out of business because the cost to do so is a rounding error for them?" At any point in time, Apple could decide to ship a nice FTP client with macOS, add web language support to XCode and Panic is du…

Well, at least they're still making games.

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#378

Post by joveian »

ryantgtg wrote: post #342
johnnyanmac wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Never heard of this Epic Games company. " 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"…

Thank you. Ok, I guess have heard of them then. I played Unreal! And I've heard many mentions of the Unreal engine. > 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. F…

My negative reaction is related to Epic's microtransaction (aka gambling, often aimed at children) and DRM use as well as being 40% owned by Tencent so your puchases now will help fund genocide.

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#379

Post by joveian »

danso wrote: post #105

Maybe change of ownership won't significantly affect Bandcamp's operation, but my limited consumer-facing experience with Epic — via its game store — has given me such a bad taste that I'm not keen on using any storefront service managed by Epic. 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,…

Bandcamp isn't really great as a store either. They don't have a real shoping cart, only client side stuff that can fail and empty your cart and/or make the entire site stop working until you clear cookies (support's response is just "oh yeah, that happens"). It seems unlikely that Bandcamp isn't sustainable from an ordinary business perspective considering that they have been voluntarily giving up their fees one day a month to support artists.

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#380

Post by thatguy0900 »

thatguy0900 wrote: post #199
shaggyfrog wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Because I paid for the game, and despite the fact I was happy to pay for it and I enjoy playing it, I think everyone else should need to pay for it, too. Otherwise all that enjoyment I had will be undone." c.f.: sunk cost fallacy

As a long time player I'll say that surfing definitely increased by a lot when it went free to play, it's not entirely sunk cost fallacy. Im high enough now that it's not much of an issue but lower ranks are rife with surfing and even in my diamond 1 games I see them enough to be annoying, at least.

*smurfing
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