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Show HN: Royalty-Free Video Game Music Library

luckylionstudios.com

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Re: Show HN: Royalty-Free Video Game Music Library

#31

Post by dkersten »

I couldn't browse at all - kept getting knocked back the loading bar. I'm using Firefox on linux. As others have said already, I'd suggest making a javascript-free version for people like me who aren't able to listen for whatever reason (and I see quicktime mentioned on the page - please please no quicktime, I refuse to install it).

For my purposes, a plain HTML page with download links to a low quality sample for me to listen to would be enough. (and obviously a shopping cart or some other way to buy the full quality versions)

Having said that, I love the idea and hope I can listen to some of your music soon.

Re: Show HN: Royalty-Free Video Game Music Library

#32

Post by hmgauna »

As a musician and former gamer, I think this is a great idea and interesting discussion about pricing and business models. Have you thought about a commission/share model? I don't know the real market, but I think most musicians won't think about the games industry as a business, so you have probably less competition there. On the other hand, lately I've seen more and more indie games, so demand seems to be growing.

With such a low price, I'll have my concerns with the lack of exclusivity. Maybe you could add a premium price to remove the audio from further selling?

Regards!

Re: Show HN: Royalty-Free Video Game Music Library

#33

Post by kephra »

What formats do you offer?

Especially, do you offer a MOD formats (1) or only streamed audio? Because better games prefer to sync with the engine, and separate spacial tracks with OpenAL.

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOD_%28file_format%29

And as told: us$5 is much to low to be taken serious!

Re: Show HN: Royalty-Free Video Game Music Library

#34

Post by metafunctor »

timaelliott wrote: post #25
ef4 wrote: post #22

I'm curious about your choice of pricing. My uninformed guess is that you can charge substantially more than this and still provide great value. Consider that $5 is about the cost of four minutes of programmer time.

Yeah, he could most likely get away with charging higher. How do you suggest a company test out pricing though? I mean I think that's exactly what Amazon has done and they get criticized for doing so (since they do it in a A/B fashion) I guess he could just bump all the songs to $10 and see if sales increase/decrease/etc over a period of time. Pricing is definitely an interesting problem, for all startups.

Personally, I wouldn't shy away from A/B testing prices (I do it), if you have enough transactions going on to run a successful experiment.

Running pricing cohorts takes more time, and doing other experiments at the same time will taint the pricing experiment.

Re: Show HN: Royalty-Free Video Game Music Library

#35

Post by cobrausn »

I'm currently working on an indie game that we hope to release within 6 months or so. Sound effects we were pretty sure we could handle, but music is another thing altogether. From what I can see here, this fits the bill very well - the music is appealing and generic enough to be put in numerous types of games, yet not so generic as to be devoid of the ability to set a mood. I like it a lot.

Also, I do agree with some of the other posters - you should charge a bit more. Seems like a steal at $5.00.

Have you considered allowing 'library license' purchases, where you pay a bit more than list but get access to the entire library and future releases as well?

As an aside, I am getting a lot of 'File Not Found'.

Re: Show HN: Royalty-Free Video Game Music Library

#36

Post by timaelliott »

cobrausn wrote: post #35

I'm currently working on an indie game that we hope to release within 6 months or so. Sound effects we were pretty sure we could handle, but music is another thing altogether. From what I can see here, this fits the bill very well - the music is appealing and generic enough to be put in numerous types of games, yet not so generic as to be devoid of the ability to set a mood. I like it a lot. Also, I do agree with som…

Haha, was just going to say the same. Got some "error establishing database connection". Looks like we broke his server.

Re: Show HN: Royalty-Free Video Game Music Library

#39

Post by peterjmag »

Great idea! One recommendation: Currently, your site loads a complete instance of the audio player for each track, which causes Flash's memory usage to shoot up by a couple hundred MB (Chrome on Windows). Might I suggest something like Yahoo's WebPlayer instead? It handles long lists of audio files more gracefully, with a single Flash object. That alone should greatly impact your page load times and responsiveness.

http://webplayer.yahoo.com/

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