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Maybe change of ownership won't significantly affect Bandcamp's operation, but my limited consumer-facing experience with Epic — via its game store — has given
by danso 5y ago
Maybe change of ownership won't significantly affect Bandcamp's operation, but my limited consumer-facing experience with Epic — via its game store — has given me such a bad taste that I'm not keen on using any storefront service managed by Epic.
And this is despite the vast majority of my Epic game library being free (literally hundreds of games) or deeply discounted — the storefront is really that bad. For example, when AWS went down a couple months ago, both the store app was non-functional. Apparently, the game store depends on S3 for game thumbnails and other metadata, and its caching is...non-optimal. I think I could've accessed my games by running their executables directly from file explorer. But 4 years in, this kind of slapped together design decision — on top of EGS still being bare bones compared to Steam — seems indicative of poor management.
Obviously, Bandcamp as a relatively mature storefront is not in the same situation. And remaining alive and sustainable probably outweighs what negatives Epic might bring as owner.
- johnnyanmac 5y ago"when AWS went down a couple months ago, both the store app was non-functional. Apparently, the game store depends on S3 for game thumbnails and other metadata, and its caching is...non-optimal." I don't see that as some kind of dealbreaker. Just an unideal choice for a consumer who may want everything to be offline and cached. The storefront is very likely some electron wrappper for their website, so I wouldn't be too surprised if their thumbnails were stored on some other server. Steam isn't too different in regards to that architecture (just not using AWS, since they preceeded that). Games are available offline as of some year+ ago so that outage should not have affected your ability to run games.
- MikusR 5y agoSteam has been running for 18 years and still has problems.
- joveian 5y agoBandcamp isn't really great as a store either. They don't have a real shoping cart, only client side stuff that can fail and empty your cart and/or make the entire site stop working until you clear cookies (support's response is just "oh yeah, that happens"). It seems unlikely that Bandcamp isn't sustainable from an ordinary business perspective considering that they have been voluntarily giving up their fees one day a month to support artists.
- Mashimo 5y agoI use the whishlist to collect what I want to buy. And then put them into the shopping cart right before I buy them.