It's so cool how they're shedding employees when their game store doesn't even have basic features like product reviews
this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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I really don't understand how people still hang on to defending EGS. It's been shit since release, it's still missing basic features years later, and it's been found doing tons of shady shit.
I'm all for more competition in these spaces, because, you know, competition pushes the companies to one up each other and build compelling features. But EGS is just blatantly missing shit and is explicitly user-hostile by buying exclusivity to their vastly inferior platform. Steam hasn't had to react at all because they're still so far ahead, and Epic is just fucking trolling users by forcing them onto their platform without working cloud saves or even non-buggy installs.
The irony that they flag-wave "user choice" while doing this just totally baffles me.
But they are great for indie developers. They've done a lot to serve the indie community by buying their games and distributing them as a free game. It gets indie studios out of the hole and into the public eye.
EGS itself is a graveyard for indie games, game discovery is complete shit and they have no plans on improving it..
When it introduced Steam Direct, Valve prioritized the development of Steam features that helped users discover games they might be interested in, such as the Discovery Queue. The Epic Games Store will continue to get interface updates, but as a matter of principle, Allison says that Epic will not track user behavior and use it to algorithmically recommend games. Epic has said in the past that it's more interested in supporting the game discovery that already happens outside of stores, such as on Twitch and YouTube.
Steam has great features to advertise indie games such as dedicated events and such so a lot of indie hits have come from it, like Valheim, Fall Guys, Among Us, Terraria, Stardew Valley, Rimworld, Factorio, The Forest, etc.
It may have been great, but not in a sustainable way.
For Epic those exclusive contracts were part of their advertising budget.
I honestly wonder how many indie games that started as an epic exclusive are still around today because of that exclusivity deal or if they only survived because eventually the exclusivity expire and they were able to list on other platforms
Most of these companies hire people constantly, then at one point, cut the people they don't find fit or are productive enough.
It's a continual cycle and the "normal" in the industry.
Don't get me wrong, I hate it's the "normal", but it is.
Maybe giving away games every Thursday is hurting them /s.
I hope that stays 100% of my library with them is all the free games. My bought games are on Steam.
fuck whoever originally owned bandcamp for selling it to epic. I have a really bad feeling about them selling it to a music licensing firm. I'm wondering if a lot of musicians are going to find a change in TOS that signs copyright over to songtradr or something.
Seriously, this fucking sucks. So likely to see all the good things about Bandcamp disappear.
Bought bandcamp just to shelf it? Thanks.
that's not what the word means, they are selling it to Songtradr.
Good thing they removed the e from trader, they must save so much money on branding.
Guess it help with SEO
I know they're not literally throwing it out, if that's what you thought I meant. I know they're selling it to someone else, but how often does this result in a good outcome? I'm predicting this is the start of the end of bandcamp. It wasn't even good to begin with, but it was the only unified place to buy music.
I found this article which states
The company is also selling Bandcamp to a music licensing company called Songtradr...
I didn't know about their ownership in the first place.
Yep, that sale was relatively new. Like, in the last year and a half.
Did that with Infinity Blade (Chair) as well because it was ‘competing for users’ apparently.
whelp, grab those free thursday games while you still can
I am, but there's no need to call me names.
sorry, that probably should have been “wench”, I’ll blame autocorrect
You're a wrench
always
If they fold, will I even be able to access the games at all anymore?
Doubt they are folding. It's probably one of those "fire these people so we have bigger income on next quarterly report" kind of schemes.
Maybe someone's bonus depends on it. Someone who'll probably move to the next company for the next quarter.
Or that. There are certain CEOs who give themselves millions in bonuses after firing 5000 developers, then complain they can't find good workers.
I doubt they’ll fold anytime soon, but they’ll probably cut back spending where they can, and the writing on the wall is already there based on the quality of the free games offered lately. Next week is like “Overcooked: Cannibal Edition”
My husband was a producer at epic for 8 years. He got cut yesterday. We're not even exercising our stock options, imho tim is spiraling and epic isn't going anywhere good. Going to the supreme court isn't cheap and then there's that abandoned mall they bought 🤷♀️
I’m very sorry to hear your husband (and you) got the short end of all of this, I hope he can find a position with another company soon!
I stopped using Bandcamp when Epic bought them. Looks like they've sold it to Songtradr, who also bought 7digital (another music store that offered DRM-free FLAC files).
I've never heard of Songtradr. Does anyone have info on their history or ethics? I would love to have Bandcamp back as an artist-friendly, customer-friendly, relatively independent source of music, but I don't want to get my hopes up.
https://rocknerd.co.uk/2023/09/28/bandcamp-has-been-sold-to-songtradr/
They're making quite a lot of acquisitions, despite Bandcamp unionising earlier this year. It's one of the biggest licencing companies in the world, so it probably won't be great for the current services of Bandcamp when Songtradr wants to start monetising its users more meaningfully to make back the acquisition cost and break even.
Maybe good growth, maybe an attempt to gauge users as deep as possible before they just shutter the company. Could go either way.
I had no idea Bandcamp belonged to Epic Games ! To this day it's my favorite platform to buy music.
I could honestly care less about the video games, but the Bandcamp news is devastating. Is there anywhere else where you can buy lossless DRM-free music?
Shitty about Bandcamp. I hope it turns out ok.