Hacker News Reader

Comment by g_sch | Hacker News Reader

I'm having a little trouble understanding the motivation for this move. Did Bandcamp have a poor revenue/profit outlook and were they looking to scale? Was this just an exit for founders? I was under the impression that they had a relatively stable and profitable business, and strongly valued their branding and positioning as independent.

View on HN

I assume it’s because Epic presented a ton of cash and a small but profitable company found it attractive.

I can’t imagine anyone wanting to work for or be part of Epic, so that’s my assumption of gobs of cash.

"I can’t imagine anyone wanting to work for or be part of Epic"

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?

I think their products suck and are sleazy. I don’t think I’ll ever be in a position where I have the opportunity, and I’d work if I was starving, but I don’t want to work for a company that makes bad products as a result of a bad philosophy.

It’s nice to be a programmer and have options but I wouldn’t work with a company that makes such invasive software.

You must have missed the recent news about Simon Peyton Jones leaving Microsoft for Epic Games[0], then.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29131996

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 involved for an engineer of SPJ's renown and experience - that requirement exists for any company that want's SPJ's time.

[0] https://discourse.haskell.org/t/an-epic-future-for-spj/3573

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

Every one of us can negotiate and hold out for what is important to us -- sure, SPJ may have more leverage than most of us, but it's not required to be at that level to be able to find a place with freedom if that's what you are looking for.

But what's in it for Epic?

The Metaverse (Epic has hosted music events in Fortnite that have had millions of attendees), diversifying their game store. They've also bought art and 3D asset companies recently.

Presumably game creators will be able to purchase bandcamp music from right within Unreal soon. You already can purchase a variety of things like textures, models, code, etc.

Perhaps Epic originally wanted to purchase itch.io but couldn't settle on a deal so they went to the O.G. instead?

Motivation for founders is a lot easier to understand than that of the acquiring company. What on earth is Epic going to do with Bandcamp?

Create a market for music licensing that Unreal engine developers can use?

This is my guess as well. Pretty much every Epic acquisition is for Unreal.

They recently acquired Harmonix (original makers of Guitar Hero and other rhythm games). Maybe they're trying to build a GaaS music game?

Comedy option? The Epic Games Store will be the new iTunes.

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.

Game soundtracks are usually sold on Bandcamp, even for games that aren't on the Epic Store.

Also could be a source of creative content to generate NFTs, maybe even tie that to licensing of music used in game livestreams.

I’m sure it’s no coincidence that Apple is big in music and they don’t like Apple. Wonder what Tim is cooking up for Tim on this one.

Metaverse concerts and fighting against Apple

I can never tell if comments are sarcastic are not...

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...

Turn the Epic Games Store into a more general Play Store/Apple Store competitor by expanding into other media types?

The Epic Games Store is barely even functional for video games. They haven't been able to implement table stakes features like reviews and a shopping cart, despite promising them for years now. Going wider and increasing its surface area even further doesn't really sound like a winning move.

User reviews are in the pipeline and shopping cart was added last year. And I doubt there were technical barriers that kept them from making this. Just a matter of other priorities on the store not immediately visible to western eyes (e.g., they have aggressively pursued regional pricing for the last 18 months).

bandcamp took VC.

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.

From the Epic side - they have to be looking at selling music in-game as a source of additional revenue. You'll be able to buy cassette tapes or virtual vinyl for your characters boombox. Of course there will be a matching dance you can also buy but maybe there will be a discount bundle.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com