"The Business of Music for Games"

 (c) James Hannigan

The big picture in the realm of videogames is big indeed: global revenue from computer game titles is projected to approach $40 billion by 2006, making it larger than the film industry in terms of receipts. (A good thing, too – the cost of producing a top-tier game title can approach $30 million or more, as much as many feature films.)

However, while what’s on the screen often takes perceptual centre stage amongst players and pundits alike, what rivals the visuals in bombast and creativity might ultimately make or break a title or even an entire platform: big sound is catching up to big picture in the videogame business, and it’s impacting the industry’s bottom line.

One indication of this trend is how major record labels, increasingly anxious to find new revenue streams for their music content to offset piracy losses and to promote new artists in a densely crowded entertainment landscape, have embraced videogames. In 2004, Vivendi Universal, the label with the largest global market share, used their fashion-forward Interscope marque to release and heavily promote an eight-CD boxed set featuring music from a make-believe radio station that plays in the background of Take Two’s wildly successful “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.” In technical terms, it’s referred to as “diegetic” or “source” music – audio emanating from the ‘gameworld’, as opposed to a conventional score existing as if for an audience outside the game. The music, though, is quite real, including tracks from Willie Nelson, Soundgarden and Public Enemy.

Electronics Arts recently established a joint venture with long-established song publisher Cherry Lane Music through which EA will sign and develop its own original artists to create new music for its games rather than license existing songs by known artists. The new music will, in turn, be repurposed for applications such as ringtones, ringbacks, film music and commercials.

Those who create and work with game audio are quickly becoming a legitimate rubric within the entertainment media industry, just as sound designers have for films over the last two decades. The Audio Engineering Society (AES), the main technical organization for the professional audio industry globally, now dedicates complex technical papers to establish and encourage uniform standards for game sound, just as the industry did for surround sound in cinemas two decades ago. 

According to the International Game Developers Association (IDGA), top audio engineers, sound designers and composers are earning six-figure salaries in some instances, with an average annual income of $57,500. Two of the leading entertainment awards institutions, U.K.’s BAFTA and NARAS, which sponsors the GRAMMY Awards, have both recently created awards categories for game audio. As the IGDA’s website enthusiastically puts it, “It's been a truism for years that game audio is neglected, overlooked, under budgeted, and otherwise given a short shrift. With the most recent wave of gaming platforms, audio capabilities are more closely matching visual power, allowing for improved sonic standards that we've long enjoyed in other media....”

Like religions, political systems and schools of art, audio for videogames has reached the point where ideological delineations have begun to manifest themselves. Understanding how these have developed is worthwhile, considering the financial stakes involved now in top-tier game titles.

Opinion

Games occupy their own part of the entertainment technology universe and sound is a key strategy for establishing and delineating that perception apart from the contexts of cinema and television. It’s not unlike how early movies were filmed from the same perspective as a theatre stage – the analogy that most pioneering filmmakers and their audiences defaulted to.

How Audio is used in a game largely determines how the game is experienced on an emotional level. Some games challenge the boundaries of where sound effects begin and music ends, and we can start thinking of the gameworld as a kind of ‘fusion reactor’ for sound and music content - free of the tyranny of older forms of classification and rendering it inappropriate to think of each as functioning independently.

Sometimes the games industry sometimes doesn't grasp the nature of the reality it strives to present to players, which often swings between real and surreal within the same game. Because real-world physics are used in 3D games and games are still largely in the technological domain thanks to ever-changing consoles, developers can sometimes believe the goal of games is to pretend to be more “real.”

But as the stakes edge towards the triple-digit billions of dollars, the realm of the game developer is going to bump heads with marketing departments and mega-corporations that will seek to use one content platform as one more strategy to sell other content – games to sell music, music to sell games, both to sell movies and clothing.

Although a good deal of music in games is licensed, there is still a role for original music in games in the same way it has a place in films - giving games a unique and consistent musical identity.  Games like GTA and EA Sports' titles are still fairly exceptional in their use of licensed music, relying on ingenious means of showcasing its use, such as an in-car radio in GTA or through a kind of 'TV magazine' approach in sports games. Licensed music isn't anything new in entertainment, but it can obviously mean big business and is likely to continue.

The industry is fragmenting and games don't just mean one thing to one group of people anymore – just as music has fragmented and defines the groups and cohorts people want to be associated with. Some want to make deeper games; others think of games as just fun distractions for people returning from the pub. But by paying attention to the music, in making it good and in understanding the dynamic between music, sound and the game, the industry weaves the game more deeply into the lifestyle of the consumer. It’s a challenge in both the musical and technological domains and where they intersect.

In fact, as games become one more cog in vast multinational entertainment conglomerates, this may provide a way to break the process of game development from that of a professional elite to one with more connection to their users, to make the notion of the game as seamless a part of everyday life as music already is.

Although the industry still has many people seeking mostly to please their peers and the so-called 'hardcore gamers,' the more successful developers take an increasingly holistic view of games, want technology to be transparent and, ironically, have probably learnt through film the importance of sound and music. So it may be fair to say that in being just as competent using sound as the film industry is can be seen as a good starting point. Whether it moves forward to being something unique, making sense  only in games, is possibly dependent on whether it's good business to or not, which is why outsiders may ultimately re-shape games when they get their hands on the technology required to make them – as these would be people free of any notions of ‘gaming tradition’. The same process took place during the collapse of the Hollywood Studio system, when ordinary folks could obtain movie cameras. Likewise, in music, with the advent of accessible recording technology.

Eventually, games may attain the same perceptual status among consumers as films have, in that the public will begin to perceive them as having been made by people instead of just companies.  Anything that connects people with the art helps the art move forward.

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