[throwhauser]

I don't know anything about Epic Games, but as a huge fan of Bandcamp, this feels like a bit of a drag.

There's something about Bandcamp that seems exactly right. It's an open, fair and creative way to discover and publish music, that is really distinct from the rest of the music business.

I'm struggling to see how that fits into a gigantic video game company. If it has to pull in so much money that it "moves the needle" at Epic at all, I don't see how it can remain anything close to what it is today.

[munificent]

Every time a small successful tech company gets swallowed by a behemoth, I feel sad. Bandcamp was one of the good ones. If Panic ever gets bought, I'll straight up cry.

An ecosystem thrives by having a variety of organisms of different species and sizes interacting. The tech business ecosystem increasingly looks more like a giant pasture of uniform grass being grazed by half a dozen aging tumorous cows.

[Apocryphon]

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.

[ryantgtg]

I’m with you. Never heard of this Epic Games company. This is worrying.

I fell behind on downloading all of my 426 purchases on bandcamp, but now I feel a strong desire to catch up.

[johnnyanmac]

"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", that free to play battle royale that usurped PUBG as "the face" of the genre. They also have a PC game store that is relatively recent and under some ire from consumers for reasons that'd take a whole essay to fully explain.

As a middleman between games and developers, the reasons to purchase a music vendor is numerous. Time will tell what they do with it, but most of their previous aquisitions are hands-off.

[AdmiralAsshat]

If you think of Epic not as a videogame company but as any other multi-billion dollar company that exists to "Maximize return for our investors by any means necessary," It makes sense. Take a company that is making money and has a large user-base, then "increase profits" (usually to the detriment of everyone involved except the company).