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Penny Arcade - Comic - The Mind-Lathe
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - The Mind-Lathe
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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As an addendum to the story, they're being paid way more money to do it, and have a secure financial foundation to continue making music for at least another year.
Wait, what?
No one will stop listening / not listen to a band because they're going to see them live, or have seen them live.
In fact, the opposite. And maybe you'll even get new fans from a live gig, who will then listen on Bandcamp.
That seems pants on head stupid.
Highpriest was making a joke that Epic was going to pay off bands to be exclusively available through bandcamp, the same way they paid developers to make PC games exclusive to the Epic store to try and buy their way into success versus Steam.
This is a bit goosey. It wasn't a pay off. It was a guaranteed payment, which allowed many developers, both big and small enough security to actually stay in business, versus zero guarantees by putting their game on Steam.
You're literally attacking people for taking a deal that guaranteed payments from Epic in order to keep their teams employed full-time to work on video games. That's a good thing. It's a very, very good thing, and it always astounds me how toxic PA seems to be when the subject comes ups.
Not just PA but the entire internet. Though I don't feel like this example was particularly toxic. I think it was more jokey.
But as a developer, I've always had nothing but sympathy for those devs. Making software isn't like making a lot of other things. You might put a huge amount of effort into something and it just lands with a thud. It's a real fear. Especially if you're not part of some large company that's figured out how to churn out software like it was just sausage or cars or elevator music.
I don't think people expressing concern about the giant fish gobbling up the little fish, are attacking the little fish for being eaten.
First off, we're talking about the companies that are agreeing to do Epic exclusives, not the companies Epic bought. If you already knew that, I feel like you're talking about that from a theoretical point of view. You haven't seen what happened to developers who took Epic's deal, have you? https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-12-12-epics-exclusivity-push-leads-to-ugliness
Fair point. I was referring to the conversation on PA and more specifically to this thread. The joke about bands being forced not to play music was not an attack on those who take Epic's deal. Personally I don't blame any developer, big or small, for taking the deal (though it gets murky when you get into Kickstarters who promised otherwise). But I'm not going to say this is a "good thing" or go to bat for Epic. They are the bad guys and their method of carving their space in the market is not good for consumers.
Big businesses - including Valve - are almost never the "good guys." They don't do things out of the kindness of their nonexistent heart, which I'm sure you well know. In this case, there weren't that many tools in the toolbox to break their PC games monopoly. Not that I think their exclusives have worked. They almost certainly underestimated the toxic backlash among a very prominent share of PC gamers (which, c'mon, at this point you should always expect a toxic backlash from a very prominent share of PC gamers for any change whatsoever).