Well, as a music producer myself I understand your angle. I even voiced this very opinion when we decided to advertise this offer.
Your sentiments are shared among other forums too, as you can imagine.
Firstly, yes we charge for the game but this extra pack was going to be free.
Most indie game developers are not raking in money. People get so many free games with Xbox Games with Gold and PS+ there's not much chance for the bulk of indies to sell anything unless it's in a 6 for $1 bundle.
As it stands, myself and Dan (the other guy that made the game) left Activision with the starry eyed dream of being nice to everyone, making a great game, asking a fair price and working WITH instead of against the music labels. (Refer to Activision's public rows with labels a few years back).
Our first mobile game, we offered a 50/50 split on every penny we made with the music producers.
We made the core game free to play, including 3 tracks, and asked players to buy packs of tracks for about $1 per track.
Aaaand gamers said they loved the game but, and I quote from an App Store review that haunts me to this day, "taking out content and selling it back to us is nothing but corporate greed..."
But the game is free!?!
"Oh yeah, we love the free tracks. Look at all our leaderboard scores and amount of people playing. But charging for the other tracks is ridiculous, you need to be able to unlock them by playing the game..."
Soooo we went back to consoles.
We couldn't ask labels to do a revenue split because there's was nothing it it for anyone the last time, so we paid for all the licenses.
On release the game is very highly rated. Everyone seems to love it. People love their free review copies... but precious few are going to bother paying for it until it's $1. Tens of thousands of people have it on their 'wish list' for when it's on mega sale. So... yay!! I guess?
So, frankly we'll be lucky if we ever break even despite making a game that's been called 'a masterpiece', 'game of the year', 'the best rhythm game for 2 decades' and 'one of the best indie game out there.'
Genuinely, and I'm past caring if you believe me or not at this point, we always said we wanted to use any platform we could make to highlight upcoming artists. We talked about offering them rev share but, as I've said, that's likely to be imaginary money. As you demonstrated, everyone thinks games are raking in money so it would've been a good plan if we were unscrupulous. I didn't want to get anyone's hopes up. We decided that, if it took off, we'd retrospectively pay these unsigned acts the same fee we'd given Flux Pavilion and Katy B.
We weren't giving nothing in return though...
The fact is, developing a 3 song download pack, preparing the game to accommodate it, running this through the store submission processes etc. etc. etc. is an immense amount of work for us. (about 2 months, to be precise). Then we were putting it in the game alongside big names and offering to promote it the same as the other artists. I genuinely thought we were doing something nice.
But, alas, I hadn't thought it through properly. While we received a LOT of offers from artists that really wanted to have their songs in our game, a few took to Twitter to accuse us of exploiting musicians. Again, I can see their point. I've been on the other end of it as a music producer.
As soon as the first few posts of backlash came in, the whole idea was ruined for me. The following day we retracted it and the link on our site now explains why we changed our mind.
So there you go.
I totally get that assholes go round offering 'exposure'... but they don't often offer 2 months of work to include your music in a project that they've spent 2 years making.
The pack was going to be given away free. While this can certainly be seen as adding to the value of the game and keeps existing players interested for a little while, it's unlikely to actually sell many more copies. It's very very unlikely to result in us buying a yachts and lording it over the people we 'exploited' to get where we are.
I genuinely hope this explains what I was thinking. Being accused of exploiting musicians really cuts me more than most things would. (Hence typing this novel of a post on my phone with shitty autocorrect fighting me the whole way).
New policy: We will pay for any music we put in the game once we are in a position to do so , and indies will have the same terms as big names.
We don't want to encourage people to give their music away... but we really do think this was a good opportunity.
Please do still send me anything you would like to see in the game. I'd love to hear it.
Also, check the game out if you're interested. And tell your friends... and tell them that waiting for sales is killing us over here in game dev land.
Much love to all. <3
Paul.