Game Audio: In The Game?

Related link: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1513022/20051104/index.jhtml?headlines=true

So EA's Steve Schnur has announced that they are making 'commissioned' music from their games available for sale. And, that future games will have these tracks available at the same time the game is released.

Okay, so not really big news. Game audio CD's have been available for a while now. So why talk about this one? Because with the big money being generated by download music, and EA's stated goal of claiming some of that for themselves, I worry about the future of audio IN THE GAME. I mean, when there is money to be made PER TRACK of the tunes you commission, then you're not using them to sell the game so much anymore, but to sell themselves. So it becomes just another co-marketing thing where we end up with songs that have about as much to do with the actual game content as "Into the West" had to do with the "Lord of The Rings" movie.



So follow me here - If a game developer is going to make money off of some name composer's 4 minute tracks, neatly packaged for CD delivery and download - then is that the kind of tracks we'll be stuck with in our games? No more interactive music (too hard to render to CD appropriate tracks), no more music that comments on specific gameplay, no more dynamic music driving the action and sucking the player into the emotional undercurrent of the game. Just a pile of songs that someone has built that will work good on the ol' download site.

Or, perhaps there will be both. We'll pay a "known" composer a bucket of money to create the 3 or 4 tracks that will be available for download - and bury them in the game somewhere. Maybe they'll be lucky enough to be title themes, but songs like this just won't work in long form interactive games. So then they'll have to hire some "unknown" composer, and pay him a quarter of a bucket of money to write the bulk of the music you actually hear in the game. Basically - if it has no commercial value outside of the game, it's not worth investing in. There is enough of this feeling in the game audio world NOW that this doesn't seem so far fetched.



Shouldn't we be more interested in adding value TO the game, from WITHIN the game? That's the $64,000 question. Those of us that have been proponents of Interactive Audio have been asking this for quite a while now, so maybe the answer has been there all the time, and we're just in a state of self-created denial.



Of course, this is all supposition - who knows what this will mean. There is a possibility that nothing about the way game audio is created or licensed will actually change. So, maybe it's nothing... but it does make me wonder. Do we care about the audio IN the game anymore? Or do we just want a hit outside the game?

Am I paranoid? Or are they really out to get me?