Epic Games Buying Bandcamp

Earlier this month, there was quite the unexpected announcement: Epic Games has bought up Bandcamp. As a regular user of Bandcamp, this has filled me with a bit of despair. I like the fact that this has been a nice place to get indie music and support artists whereby we could actually make sure musicians received a few bucks for their work rather than the fractions of a penny places like Spotify give them. Having a fairly large corporation calling the shots is very concerning.

Sure, they can try to assuage fears making claims that they will leave things as is, but how often does that hold true in the long term when a big corporation gobbles up a tinier company? Epic has made it clear that they’re big fans of nickle and diming people through Games as a Service business models. As such, why should we trust them not to change Bandcamp into a platform with a model that serves shareholders first and foremost rather than the artists.

While Epic has set up a system for selling games digitally whereby the people making them get a better cut than they would on other platforms, I’m always apprehensive of putting much faith in them. How much of this is facilitated by all of the money they made from Fortnite? That game makes money hand over fist, but the Epic Games Store has been losing hundreds of millions of dollars per year since its inception. This situation leaves me wondering how much Epic’s generosity toward game developers is predicated on the success of Fortnite. If that money dries up, what will happen with the Epic Games Store? How would Bandcamp fare?

Epic has already been caught doing some shady stuff with Fortnite by adding dances created by other people without compensating them (and also not even telling them!). This just seems like the mask slipping a little bit.

At the end of the day, maybe I’m wrong about this and Epic will herald in a new age for indie music distribution. What I’ve mentioned above and a general distrust for corporations makes me far from optimistic this is the case. I wonder if we’ll get to the point where people will just grab the songs off YouTube with yt-dlp and toss a few dollars in a Patreon for the artist instead depending what happens with Bandcamp under Epic.

Pennywhether

pennywhether@posteo.net

March 22, 2022