We are an indie game dev studio trying to make sense of the current fmod license.
We are developing MANY small budget indie games with the idea that one of them will take off and go big but many will never cover costs.
So while we are totally happy to pay the $2k fmod fee for our flagship game, paying $2k for EVERY game we want to make (4-5 titles per year plus potentially dozens of small game jams) it would ultimately exclude fmod as an option all together, we would be forced to simply switch to Unity built in sound or something (which we’d rather not do as fmod is the tool of choice for our audio engineer).
We haven’t released any games with fmod in them yet but this is obviously we don’t want any grey areas regarding middleware fees and want to work with you and the EULA.
If your total studio revenue is lower than $200k usd per year then you can use the free indie license as specified at www.fmod.com/licensing. If your revenue is above this then it is $2000 per title. We wouldn’t typically count game jam entries as commercial titles unless you are planning to release them publicly for sale.
For historical context, the current fmod EULA asks for $2k per game but the requirements are measured on company revenue not per game revenue.
This means that for free or near-free games published by us the $2k fmod license would represent anywhere between 100% and infinity% of game revenue.
Publishing more than 12 titles per year would mean the fmod fees would be double the fees we pay to Unity and we would be paying fmod 10% or higher of our total company revenue.
We couldn’t work it out even with a custom license arrangement. I’m not going to speculate on what’s going on behind closed doors but it feels like corporate are insistent that their pricing is correct (even though our profitable use case is effectively priced out).
If anyone stumbles across this you might want to check out Wwise. They offer many more licensing options to bridge the gap between free and $7000, including a per-project budget (instead of on company revenue), and even offer a 1% revenue share option (and even GAAS tiered pricing).
We’re sorry we couldn’t find a pricing model that fits your very specific needs, but we will be happy to continue the discussion we were having by email at any time.
I wouldn’t say it’s “very specific” if Wwise caters specifically for it (in multiple ways) but I do appreciate a CEO who jumps into the forums to tell us exactly how we are still wrong
