I’m tired of games getting songs removed, so I am actually glad Rockstar and hopefully others are going the route of trying to only get songs that won’t end up having to be removed down the line. Not cool getting an update getting a song removed.
it’s interesting to think about the logistics here. How much money should Rockstar have allocated for the soundtrack, to offer a better deal to artists? The article mentions that they licensed over 240 songs for GTA5. At $7500 a song (who knows what they actually paid), that’s $1.8 million. The total budget for GTA5 was around $265 million, so that $1.8 million is less than 1% of the total budget. Some songs surely cost more than $7500 to license, so let’s assume it added up to 1% of the budget by the end. Evidently GTA6 is looking like a $2 billion budget game atm (absolutely bonkers), and I don’t think it’s unreasonable for them to allocate at least the same percentage to the music licenses, given how central the soundtrack is to the GTA experience.
If they allocated 1% of $2 billion to the soundtrack, that would give them $20,000,000 to play with, or average $83k per song if they are going for about the same size of soundtrack. Now, this is all just my quick napkin math based on the assumption that Rockstar paid about $7500 per song for GTA5, but I think this indicates that either A) they are massively underballing Heaven 17 here, or B) Rockstar senior management has not allocated a music licensing budget that matches the size of the game they are making.
What do y’all think? Is $83k per song a reasonable rate for the kind of license Rockstar is asking for? Or is even that too low?
I’ve never heard of Heaven 17. On GTA V, there are a lot of bands than I had never heard of too. Rockstar introduced me to those bands, their other work, solos from those members, and other artists in those genres.
Frankly, if I was a musician that wasn’t already a huge star, I’d do it for FREE because of the massive GUARANTEED exposure.
artists die from “exposure”, because it doesn’t pay the bills. I think you are right that the exposure has value, but it definitely doesn’t have $83k worth of value, because musicians simply do not make money from album sales anymore. Most artists barely break even from doing concert tours.
Artists die from not getting exposure. This isn’t one of those “play my wedding for exposure” things. It’s being a regular song playing in one of the world’s most popular game franchises.
They should get paid, sure, but telling them to fuck off because the rate wasn’t what they want is dumb.
It takes upward of 200 streams of a track on Spotify to earn a single penny. 20,000 streams to earn a dollar.
(For me and my personal expenses, this would mean I would need 40,000,000 streams per month to pay rent/pay bills/eat. I’m dirt poor and live a dirt poor budget. 40,000,000 streams to pay $1400 in rent is INSANE.)
That “exposure” can still add up to “not paying the bills.”
Also, if he gains no new listeners? He would have made a huge mistake not angling for more money.
This guy is being smart, and the rich just want people to THINK that exposure is worth it. Even Oprah pays in exposure and its bullshit. The company has got the fucking money to pay it they just don’t want to.
You, as an individual, buy enough of their stuff to support them month-to-month? How generous of you.
Now that the snark is out of the way: Clearly an individual doesn’t make enough money to do that, and if you’re the only new fan they gain that’s still nowhere near enough to make a living.
You could have responded without being an asshole. If we had discussed this politely we probably could have reached an acceptable middle ground and both learned something from the other person’s experiences and ideas.
You’re coming out here arguing in favor of a megacorporation keeping even more money for itself instead of artists getting paid for their work. I feel like you should have expected to have upset people.
It’s the internet. Calm down. Not everything has to be a fight. Use that energy to yell about something more important, like genocide or climate change. Goodbye
To be fair, they were smart enough to get some exposure even without accepting the deal. This is not the first place I see this discussion and some people are definitely going to check their stuff now out of curiosity.
But this exposure is short-lived with an incredibly limited audience Who may or may not listen to it. I did not look them up. I don’t have the time right this moment and I will definitely forget.
I just think that in this particular video game franchise, even if they did not receive the amount of money they wanted upfront for royalties, They could not pay for this kind of Marketing opportunity.
Sometimes, when I play a AAA game and something expensive is visible on screen (e.g. half of New York getting destroyed during that long quick-time event in Spider-Man), I like to shout “Production value!” at nobody, like that director self-insert kid in “Super 8” (2011).
I get a feeling I would ruin my voice doing this every time in GTA 6.
To answer your question, I think we would have to look at what music licenses usually cost. Some quick googling tells me that $7500 is hardly an outrageously low sum for a song from a middle of the road '80s band. They aren’t exactly Depeche Mode. I think they would have benefited far more from the inclusion of their song in this game financially (since it would cast them into the limelight again, providing streaming revenue and perhaps gain them new fans) than the little and likely very temporary publicity they gained from rejecting the offer.
But your assumption is that every artist gets the same deal. Some maybe more valuable and expensive than others. Then the question is, if this group was valued very low and that is whats upsetting. But come on, 7500 for lifetime rights is really bad payment. I wonder what the deals with prior games and songs was.
and there’s no way Rockstar is going to be paying $99 million dollars for just songs.
GTA V/Online produced $8.5 billion in revenue.
I mean, I guess you’re not wrong, (how else could they be milking it for this much money but being cheap?) but it still makes them fucking cheap bastards.
I think it’s really clear that Rockstar is trying to avoid a repeat of past soundtracks and licensing issues and they want these up-front with no royalty payments to make in the future, so they don’t have to keep re-negotiating licensing (and having to remove/replace songs in old games).
I still think this guy was being smart for asking more, even if he asked too much. You’re right, he shouldn’t have high-balled, but he was smart enough to understand getting a percentage or royalties was probably almost assuredly out of the question.
I’m glad Rockstar is taking the route of trying to only get songs that they won’t have to remove down the line. Should be the move forward for all games. Wish same would happen for racing games too. Would rather have knock off brands over delistings.
Actually, yeah I can. Every time a fucking bean-counter makes a living humans life worse at their job to save the company a buck is a great time to blame accountants for doing their fucking jobs.
Accountants don't make decisions, they are just paper bitches for real people along with shit like lawyers and marketing. They just present the numbers to business leadership who makes decisions on which expeses to approve.
If they’re a 1-hit wonder, maybe that’s why they want more up front: In case they gain no new listeners from the GTA 6 soundtrack and continue to be a 1-hit wonder.
It’s like why football players have insane-sounding contracts: Because in the future they won’t be able to make the same kind of money.
Sounds to me like homie was smart and thinking long-term.
I just heard some of their tracks and I feel like it wasn’t a huge loss not being able to hear a Duran Duran or Depeche Mode wannabe band while I’m murdering hookers in GTA6
I don’t see the logic in that though. They can’t really expect to be paid so much more than groups who offer greater recognition. It’s like charging more for the Walmart brand over the name brand product.
I love Lemmy, but the general consensus of “fuck big corpo no matter what” attitude is kinda tiring. This is completely reasonable for Rockstar to reject the counter offer. Not to mention, Heaven 17 is not some big band to begin with.
Agreed. As I understand it, $50k-$100k is on the high end for a TV show to use a clip from a very well known song in an episode. Some band I’ve never heard of being paid $22k for their song to be played in the background of a game might be a little on the low end, so it’s totally reasonable for the band to counter, but it’s also totally reasonable for Rockstar to turn down a 10x counter. Publicly crying about it seems childish. The game is gonna happen with or without your song.
I am one of the few people who was actually excited about the game since its gameplay trailer. I’m glad the game does not work on Linux and therefore didn’t wasted my 40 Euros. So even if I want give them my money, promote the game for free and play it, I can’t.
As someone who works in gamedev, I’m sure that some of the people there are passionate about it and it is gutwrenching to see your work fail so hard. I’m sad for every project that launches after years of work and fails to get any attention or sales, and I’m definitely sure there’s someone losing sleep due to that.
I never worked in super-large projects, but I did work for a AAA studio and even there, you got people invested into the project.
From how I’ve seen it, you wouldn’t work in gamedev unless you are passionate about it, because you can get drastically better pay for the same job in other, more business focused, industries. So, if all you cared about is money, you have better options.
I heard Concord was originally designed to have an entirely different art style, but some top-down decision came to make it yet another hyper-realistic shooter. That’s why the character designs are so weird, they’d be more at home in their original retrofuture/art deco stylized world.
the hardware design team is so far up their own asses with the PS5 design. Here’s two articles where you can read how high they are on their own supply: One, Two
i mean…you could always buy the add-on disc drive? Assuming that it is still compatible with the Pro, not sure why it wouldn’t be. They get to fleece physical media heads for an extra $80, that’s a win for Sony.
awesome! just double-check that it’s compatible with the new one before dropping the extra $80! Nothing about the Pro is official yet, so we still gotta wait and see.
The kicker is that owning the disk entitles you to a piece of plastic, and not much more at the moment. When servers go down, or day one patches are no longer available, the disk becomes no better than a coaster for many modern games.
a crime if true. The article says that it “will include ‘more than 15’ playable games from the series’ history”, and they only list 9 in the article and trailer, so maybe it will be one of the versions not listed?
Not to burst your bubble, but that is a screenshot of the “Time Warp” mode from the trailer. Although if they built the GB style into that mode, maybe that is promising for getting the actual GB game in the collection?
This may be true after all since Nintendo owns the Tetris license and this could be competition for switch online so perhaps they didn’t want to agree to the full GB version
But they have the NES / Famicom version of Tetris, which is owned by Nintendo too. Unless they mean the infamous Tengen / Atari version on NES (some say its better, but there were legal trouble because of Nintendo).
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