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Music Media Businesses Entertainment Games

Gaming Music Goes Mainstream 34

Posted by Zonk from the more-than-just-beeps-and-boops dept.
Steve writes "CNN has posted an article about the emergence of a big business in video game music. According to the author, budgets for one game recently surpassed $300,000, with composers being paid between $700 and $1500 per minute of composition, even more 'if it's produced for an orchestra.' The article points out that the production quality of game music has surpassed that of television, where money is rarely budgeted for high-quality soundscapes."
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Gaming Music Goes Mainstream More

Gaming Music Goes Mainstream

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  • Most interesting music == Games (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Cerberus7 ( 66071 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @03:30PM (#13298023)
    Good! I've found that in the last few years, the music I find most interesting is composed for games. Hollywood soundtracks still provide some good stuff, but the more imaginative things are coming from games. The downfall has been the instrumentations, being mostly relegated to various qualities of synth. That's fine for the songs that use synth the way it was meant to be used, not when it's used because they didn't have the budget to use the instruments they really wanted. It's annoying to hear what should clearly be a great piece, but have it sound so bad. Now, with them getting more money, maybe we'll get more and more real instruments where they're needed.
    • I've found that the higher quality synthesizers with the high-end samples are virtually indistinguishable from a real orchestral performance, as far as soundtracks go at least. The cost of entry for quality hardware and samples might be high, but you can re-use it for no additional cost, unlike a real orchestra.

      I understand that this is why several television composers use their own synths instead of a real orchestra. I believe the music for StarGate is done on synth rather than real orchestras.

      Is there a d

      • I've found that the higher quality synthesizers with the high-end samples are virtually indistinguishable from a real orchestral performance, as far as soundtracks go at least. The cost of entry for quality hardware and samples might be high

        Unlike the royalties for samples, the cost of hardware cannot be so easily amortized because the players have to purchase the hardware in order to play the game. If the cost for quality synthesizer hardware is high, then how do you expect the console maker to sell 20

        • You misunderstand. I refer to the composer purchasing a synthesizer and samples, and using that to produce a score. The audio in the games is simply compressed audio, or a soundtrack for a TV show.

          The cost savings I was referring to was the cost of the composer purchasing a professional synthesizer and professional samples, as opposed to repeatedly hiring an orchestra to record the performances. The cost of high-end hardware may well be more than the cost of the orchestra for a game, but you can use the har

          • The audio in the games is simply compressed audio

            So how many DVDs, Mini-DVDs, UMDs, or DS cartridges is your game going to take up, and how will your players like swapping media during gameplay?

            or a soundtrack for a TV show.

            Granted, your point works for TV shows and independent films, as such a work is just one long FMV sequence. However, games are typically much longer than TV shows and need not only more music but also more flexibility in the music, such as the ability to turn tracks on or off d

            • You do realize that pretty much every game made in the last 5 years has featured compressed or CD audio?

              If the game ships on DVD, it has roughly 9.4GB to work with. Put a quarter of the DVD towards compressed audio, that is 42 hours of compressed audio. At the cost listed in the article, let's say $800 per minute, that much music would cost over 2 million dollars.

              So as you can see, storage space is NOT a limitation. As much music as you can produce for a game, you can store. I can't speak for the DS or PSP,

              • You do realize that pretty much every game made in the last 5 years has featured compressed or CD audio?

                At least the WarioWare series (currently two GBA titles, one GameCube title, and one Nintendo DS title) uses MIDI because it needs to vary the tempo of each individual song from 140 BPM to over 300 BPM. And not many GBA games use compressed audio, even though the software decoder is available and permissively licensed [pineight.com].

                If the game ships on DVD, it has roughly 9.4GB to work with. Put a quarter of the

                • At least the WarioWare series (currently two GBA titles, one GameCube title, and one Nintendo DS title) uses MIDI because it needs to vary the tempo of each individual song from 140 BPM to over 300 BPM. And not many GBA games use compressed audio, even though the software decoder is available and permissively licensed.

                  Again, handhelds exist in a different marketspace than consoles. For one thing they are generally 1 to 2 (5 to 10) years behind consoles in capabilities, so the current crop of handhelds are e

                  • Agreed on most of your points, but:

                    Most modern devices use wavetable synthesis for their synthesized audio.

                    They use general-purpose PCM playback channels, which can be configured as wavetable synths (by varying the sample rate and output volumes) or as playback channels for decompressed audio (by holding them constant). They can generally be set to 8-bit linear PCM, 16-bit linear PCM, or some variation on 4-bit ADPCM.

                    No, Vorbis is overkill. MP3 will do

                    MP3 decoding is a patented process, and esp

                    • MP3 decoding is a patented process, and especially for projects with a smaller music budget, many developers can't afford to license it.

                      Console manufacturers require hefty licence fees just to develop games for a platform, so MP3 licencing fees are probably not a big deal. CPU power really isn't a big deal. The official licencing fee for MP3 is 75 cents per unit, meaning per shipped copy of a game, or US $50k one-time. As I mentioned, peanuts compared to the platform licencing fees and publisher fees.

                      The Ga

  • Bad. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Wilson_6500 ( 896824 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @03:58PM (#13298290)
    This is just another way direction in which game budgets are inflating, pushing out smaller developers/publishers/etc. who can't afford huge music budgets and the detailed development of thousand gigabyte player meshes.
    • I blame EA, Microsoft, Sony, and Fox News Channel.
    • Seriously, how does this push out the smaller developers/publishers/etc.? They can still make the same stuff they did before. If the smaller developers were making great games, then after this revelation, I am sure they will still make great games. It's not like their killing PC gaming off. That will kill the small-timers. They are just saying that a lot of money is being spent on music and sound. That doesn't mean everyone now has to spend the same in order to make a game.

      The same goes for graphics.

    • Re:Bad. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Edgewize ( 262271 )
      So you advocate a position where large developers cannot spend more money on a title than small developers? Where all the games match the lowest common denominator of what any studio can produce?

      Because that doesn't sound quite right to me.
      • Clearly that's not the best solution either, but it seems like some common ground could be reached.

        I think part of the problem lies with reviewers. A lot of reviewers are starting to have high expectations for music. It's not a big deal when they take notice of high quality music, but when they mark down games without licenced music or orchestral music, it starts to be detrimental to smaller developers.

        For example, Burnout 2 had a decent instrumental soundtrack. It probably was pretty cheap to produce
    • Are you proposing that progress in game development should be halted just so that every little game studio can keep up with the big boys?

      Don't get me wrong. I too would like to see smaller developers have better chances in setting up.

      But where's the benefit in slowing progress and thus hindering any growth?
      The better games get, the better (aint that obvious?)
  • There are some great big-budget soundtracks for games. That I agree with.

    I'd also like to point out the obvious - great music does not imply a lot of money. Anyone here play Beyond Good and Evil? That game had some of the best music I've ever heard in a game (or television show, or movie for that matter!) and it was a relatively low-budget game. Unfortunately, it was also very under-appreciated - but that is another argument all together. :)

  • As an aspiring game music composer, I'm beginning to realise that you're worth every bit that much to produce quality music. You really have to pour your heart and soul into every note in order to make a memorable soundtrack, no matter what the budget.

  • About Time! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Edward Kmett ( 123105 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @05:06PM (#13298761) Homepage
    Yeah the difference is that the average end user typically doesn't spend 40 hours in front of a television listening to the same bit of soundtrack over and over again.

    (That is unless you go out and rent/buy 4-5 seasons of a show at a time and watch them in marathon sessions like I do.)

    I'm glad people are finally spending more money on video game sound tracks. After several hours of the same speed-metal high-adrenaline "fight music", I typically want to take a hammer to whatever faceless composer put together the repetitive noise I'm listening to, and then follow up by bludgeoning whatever management muckety-muck cut his 'masterwork' down to a 2 minute loop, so as to maximize the throbbing in my temples.
  • Everyone here is talking about the expenses of composition and orchestration of original work, but much of the article is actually about the big bucks that developers are spending to license popular music. Advertising synergy and whatnot...

  • Props where due (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Dachannien ( 617929 ) on Friday August 12, 2005 @01:04AM (#13301408)
    One of my favorite game soundtracks is from TES: Morrowind. Jeremy Soule came up with about an hour's worth of phenomenal orchestral composition, and the collector's edition of the game included these songs on an extra CD. (Yes, the game has them in mp3 format, so I could have burned my own, but that's beside the point.) Considering that there are hundreds of hours of gameplay available in Morrowind (and I'm sure I spent that much time playing), it's amazing that not once did I tire of the music. Not only did I never turn it off in-game, but I also listen to it in my car on occasion. Compare this to the pretty good soundtracks from Diablo II and World of Warcraft, which got old after a while.

    Nobuo Uematsu, famed composer for the Final Fantasy series of games, also deserves recognition. For several games in a row, he was composing music for very limited platforms. Then comes FF8, with a wonderful orchestral piece accompanying the closing credits. There were indications that Square had made FF8 into sort of a movie that you play. This was shortly before their full CG Final Fantasy theatrical movie came out, and it seemed like FF8 was partially a technology proof-of-concept and partially an attempt to get geared up for making a movie. Anyway, the "game as movie" theme would simply not have worked had the music been merely average, but Uematsu's soundtrack made it work.

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