ScirraTom
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Hi everyone!

My name is Tom, and I'm from Scirra (http://www.scirra.com).  We make Construct 2 which is a game engine mainly for Indie Game Developers.

We recently opened up our store: http://www.scirra.com/store and are in the process of sourcing high quality assets to sell.

We receive over 1 million page views per month and 100k unique visitors per month.  Unsurprisingly our audience is mainly people interested in making games, and Indie Game Developers often have a passion for retro style assets smile

We're currently looking for some awesome Chiptune music as we think this will sell well!  I hope I'm in the right place smile  We want 'bundles' of tunes that are:

- High quality
- Loopable
- Generic enough to fit a wide variety of games
- At least 5 songs per bundle
- Awesome

The normal cut we take is 30% after fees have been deducted (typically Paypal transaction fees).  We have a full time artist working for us so there's also the possibility at no charge to artists for us to brand/style the bundles as we have done for the current bundle we have in the store:
http://www.scirra.com/store/music-bundl … escription

All songs we sell in our store will be distributed under our Royalty Free License agreement, which you can view here:
http://www.scirra.com/rfl.txt

We would be looking to sell these bundles of ChipTune songs for around £10.  There's also the possibility of selling them individually at around £2-£3 per song.

If you're interested, please post links to your works here!  Alternatively you can email me directly on tom at scirra.com, but please make sure you do include links to your work.

Thanks for reading anyway!  I'll bookmark this thread and come back to it soon.

Tom

Last edited by ScirraTom (Jul 9, 2012 10:02 pm)

ChipsChallengeBand
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Rochester, NY

Hey, this sounds cool.

Personally, I think being able to buy Chip's Challenge "loops" kind of lessens the value of our songs, though.  I tried imagining a Special Beam Cannon loop in a game and well... I didn't like the idea. 

Just my opinion.

Auxcide
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The Multiverse ::: [CA, Sac]

I could see it. But I'd be very picky about what game of was in. Chipfan08

As for me, I had a lot of loopable songs that were unreleased, gotta sort through and bundle them. What's a good length for a loopable song?

ScirraTom
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If you feel that the loop requirement significantly devalues your work in any way, then please send it unlooped to us, we will still consider it!

The Matt Oglesby songs we have in the store are around 2 mins in length.  Length is pretty meaningless in my opinion, however long the tune is is how long it is!

HPizzle
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Neo Jersey

personally, i'd rather have someone come to met and say here is exactly what i need and make something that is tailor made for that game. Rather than to try and make something generic that can be used for whatever. i just don't think the end result would be as good as it could be. i mean whats going to be better, the premade salad, or a custom made salad with the ingredients you choose? Yeah, there may be people who come along and the generic premade stuff suffices for them, but some of us want bacon and hard boiled eggs and all that other good shit that you can get from a custom made salad. Did that make any sense? lol

Auxcide
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The Multiverse ::: [CA, Sac]

That made me want a cobb salad.

ilkae
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montreal, qc

Hmmm, let me think about this for a second.
10gbp minus paypal fees minus 30% = $10.31 CAD

License a bunch of tunes, non-exclusively, to a game of questionable/irrelevant quality for perpetuity, for an amount of income that wouldn't even buy me a pack of smokes? I'll pass.

Decktonic
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Westfield, NJ

How long would each loop be?

Zef
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I'll admit the cut seems a bit low; but I think that this is kind of one of those areas where if you don't like it; move on and let the man do his thing; he's trying to help out a certain demographic.

Best of luck to you; but I'm going to pass.

ilkae
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montreal, qc
Zef wrote:

I'll admit the cut seems a bit low

It's funny how perception of fairness works. At a 15% cut, the same as bandcamp charges, I'll bet a lot of people would jump at the chance to have their music hosted by a marketplace that focuses on licensing opportunities which (at least in principle) could serve as great marketing opportunities for the artist. You might make, like, 100$ in a year from prospective game devs who love your tunes and think they would be "perfect" for their imaginary iOs unicorn dream, yet never produce a game. And if they do make a game, hey, free promotion. Sweet.

What poisons this potential income stream is this: how are you going to *feel* when some game featuring your music becomes a 6-figure app store success, and you priced your contribution to that work somewhere around the cost of a mcdonalds combo meal? I'd happily lop a prospective 100$ off of my yearly music income to avoid such an acute bad feeling.

Last edited by ilkae (Jul 11, 2012 3:22 am)

herr_prof
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Unsubscribe

I have to admit to be slightly in the dark about such things, but aren't the majority of music commissioned for games a flat fee sorta thing? I haven't heard a lot of revenue share deals coming from the music side.

If I was an artist looking to get into games, Id probably give a site like this some of my work to get a few indie games in my portfolio and to get my name out, but wouldn't go nuts with my entire body of work or anything.

ChipsChallengeBand
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Rochester, NY

Pretty sure it's flat fees, yeah.

ilkae
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montreal, qc

Certainly not a $10 flat fee. That lands squarely in "I'd rather have a say in where my tunes end up" territory.

ScirraTom
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It appears I may have misunderstood your needs as artists, the two publishers we currently host in the store are very happy with the arrangement and we're in the process of negotiating with several other artists at the moment.

30% cut might sound like a lot, but the time we are investing in developing, maintaining and marketing the store means that 30% is the realistic number where it becomes worth us running.  For your 30% you also get exposed to our audience which consists of 100,000 unique visitors a month. 

Don't forget this isn't commissioning specific tunes for specific games, this is an asset store that indie game developers can buy from to add to their games.  A typical user might be making a game but lack music composition ability so instead decide to buy a pack of songs to use in his games.

What exactly would you want from a deal like this?  What could we change?  What do you usually charge for your music?  I'm totally happy to discuss other options and possibilities.

Last edited by ScirraTom (Jul 11, 2012 5:13 am)

ilkae
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montreal, qc

Oh, don't let me scare you off. You're not far off the mark, and I could easily see the point in creating loops specifically for a site like this.

_-_-
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Construct is great, I'd gladly make some loops for you.