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Gaming Music Goes Mainstream
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."
I'm switching back to my music major.
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.
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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 Zonk. The whole thing is just creepy.
Wow... things have come a long way since Midi music in video games...! Phew.
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The same goes for graphics. Just because people are using software and hardware that costs a lot of money doesn't mean in any way that small-timers can't continue what they are doing. Unless PC gaming dies off and consoles continue with the license-to-produce, then nothing is hurting small-timers anymore than ATI/nVidia making a new video card, AMD/Intel making faster CPUs or even OpenGL going to 2.0.
Or did you want everything to remain simple for small-time people to get involved. In the same line of thought, I wish computers would go back to the time when I could put some vacuum tubes together and make a whole new product.
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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.
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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.
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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...
Some of the "older" (pre-2000) games have pretty incredible soundtracks, I think. I've made a few ringtones from the midi files at the Video Game Music Archive. It has content from almost every system, including the newer ones. I don't like the trend of licensing popular music, but oh well.
That's the shit that feds me up
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.
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 million units of a console with a built-in synth and still make a profit?
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 depending on the situation around the player.
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.
If the game ships on DVD, it has roughly 9.4GB to work with. Put a quarter of the DVD towards compressed audio
What you say may be true of the Xbox and PlayStation 2 but not of the GameCube and PSP. GameCube discs have about 1.5 GB of space; PSP UMDs have 1.8 GB. A quarter of that for music will get you roughly 400 MB. Now the consoles' built-in wavetable synths use some form of ADPCM (4 bits per mono sample with predictive filtering) as a native waveform encoding, giving only 2.5 hours at 44100 Hz stereo (352 kbps). Compare this to the typical play time of an RPG. Or were you planning on using Vorbis decoded in software, which eats a lot of CPU time compared to ADPCM decoded in hardware? Even then you get only three times that.
At the cost listed in the article, let's say $800 per minute, [42 hours of] music would cost over 2 million dollars.
What is the budget of a Square Enix RPG?