Deep-dive on sound

I had a simple task in my project’s Linear, entitled something like “Find sounds for game”. This was, of course, a ridiculous oversimplification, and I was ultimately led down a week-long rabbit hole.

I’d previously had a good experience with Epidemic Sound and was impressed by their library of sound effects. They seemed to have a lot of what I was looking for, and it was a relief to know all the effects I needed would come from one source.

The licensing catch

But trawling through old Reddit posts for reviews, I noticed a licensing issue. An Epidemic Sound subscriber can use the effects for (largely) whatever they want, including video games — but if that game were to be featured on a reviewer’s YouTube channel (or any YouTube channel not operated by the licensee), a licence would be required by that channel owner.

Consequently, indie developers hoping for a review from a top influencer now have to add options to their games to disable music and sound, to protect the channel owner from Content ID claims from these libraries.

I’m not really sure yet whether this is a huge edge case that I’ll never need to worry about, but it seems odd that a professional game reviewer cannot review a game unless it’s muted. It does make you wonder what sort of licensing agreement huge studios have, if indeed they use library sound effects, because this problem doesn’t seem to affect gaming channels in the same way.

Looking further afield

In any case, looking beyond the likes of Epidemic, Soundstripe, Artlist etc., I started to see some good reviews of libraries from BOOM — and their sounds are in a different league. I’m checking the licensing agreement here too, to see if there are any fundamental differences (a lot of big studios are named on their site), so we’ll see what the outcome is.

What’s in the game now

Anyway, in Spherica I’ve added a range of sounds for missile launches, and explosions for the alien spacecraft being destroyed. The nice thing about BOOM’s samples is that a lot of their packs include four variations in one file. So each missile launch, for example, sounds slightly different from the previous one, which makes a huge difference to the realism of the audio.