Epic Games begins to show it’s “more than games,” acquires Bandcamp

At some point, Epic Games might need to admit what kind of company it wants to be and drop the word games from its name.

The game maker moved to acquire the online music-streaming service, which revolves around the purchase of mp3s, FLACs, and other audio files without the need for a license. The news came out via press releases. Neither side of the deal has made public its financial terms.

The move is related to the fact that the company is going to become a new kind of digital media company in the near future.

A quicker way to slap SoundCloud rap into Fortnite?

The acquisitions of gaming studios, software developers, and tool creators make sense with the Unreal Engine product. Unreal Engine 4 and 5 are open-ended 3D-creation systems that have brought tools like superior compression or more realistic virtual humans.

What is the Unreal Engine table made of? As of press time, the company isn't saying. The best hint comes in the Wednesday press release, which emphasizes the vision of building a creator marketplace for content, technology, games, art, music and more.

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This wording suggests that Bandcamp is a better option than the continued clunkiness of the Epic Games Store. Do you want to use music in your project? Future creators could use the existing tags on the website to search for tunes inside of Unreal Engine and pay a license based on the song.

Since the company acquired and began developing a new 980,000-square-foot headquarters in early 2021, there has been a story that has been brewing in its home state of North Carolina. There are job listings that blur the line between video game production duties and live-action filming needs. At least some of these positions involve this new massive physical location, which was previously a mall down the road from the existing offices in Cary, North Carolina.

That news follows Unreal Engine's increasingly popular utility in TV and film production throughout Hollywood. Ars Technica has previously covered how beloved film director/producer Jon Favreau favored Unreal Engine as a real-time digital effects system and how UE allowed camera crews and actors alike to frame and preview CGI aspects in the middle of a live-action shoot.