How (and how much) to charge as a game audio freelancer

If you are into game audio, chances are you are a creative person and probably negotiating rates and studying the market is not the kind of thing you enjoy. I have been there. So here are a few tips on how to make these things a bit easier. Most of these basic ideas also apply to negotiating salaried positions.

Costs and prices directionality

Before we get into it, some economic concepts. There are basically two perspectives: Costs inform prices or vice versa. Let’s see both cases:

• Costs inform prices: This view first looks at the costs we have to incur to do our job plus our “salary” that we use to just live. So some people recommend calculating your living and working expenses taking into account taxes, holidays, sick days plus some extra margin for safety. Once you come with a number, you can do the math to know how much you should charge (your price as a professional).

• Prices inform costs: We go the other way around. The very first thing we determine is how much our expertise and time is worth. Not how much we think is worth, how much the outside world thinks is worth and that’s a key distinction. Once we have an approximation, we know our rate and we can now consider if it is enough to cover our expenses.

Which one is better? Which one is true? Is a matter of perspective but in my opinion, the second option is superior. I prefer it because, in the short-medium term you will probably have more control of your costs than of your real market worth. In other words, it is easier to cut costs than to improve your professional profile, at least in the short term. If you start off with a wrong assumption about your worth (because you think about costs first), you will handicap your career from the start.

So let’s see how we can infer how much value our work really has.

Figuring out your worth

I want to stress again that it doesn’t matter if you think you are great and should be paid like one of those high profile lawyers, it is the people who need your services who determine your worth. That’s the ugly truth but there is a silver lining.

If you are starting out or in the first years of your career you most likely have the opposite problem: you are undervaluing your worth. So the great news is that people that potentially want to hire would probably pay you more than you think. Awesome. Now let’s figure out how to enter these conversations with something to guide us.

Prices are lights that guide us in the darkness of uncertainty. Without them, you would not know if it is better to go somewhere by helicopter, car or bus. They are needed to calculate and make decisions. If you enter a conversation with a potential client and you don’t really know how much your work is worth, you are starting off with a hand tied behind your back.

The best thing to do is to look around, study the market Check out salary surveys and polls. Also have a look at sites like Glassdoor or Payscale. Talking to audio peers is also a good idea. Take all these numbers into account carefully. To start with, salaries vary enormously per country and per city so try to adapt the numbers to your situation. Same applies with years of experience and the technologies or skills that you are comfortable with. Try to calculate a number that roughly matches your case. It will never be 100% accurate because there is no true accurate number. Is only an approximation but a very useful one.

Once you have a number, you can do the math to get an idea of your hourly rate and your yearly rate. Both are useful to calculate things later. Take into account that these rates should be pre-tax and should include a “freelance premium” of about 15-25% to account for the uncertainty of gig based work. If you want a salaried position in a studio, your rate should probably be lower.

Now that we have our basic rate, let’s see how we can charge for our work. I think all these methods are valid, it all depends on the circumstances so it is good to have all of them under your belt.

Charging per time worked

This is common in a lot of professional disciplines. The good part is that if the job takes more time than expected, you will get paid for that extra workload, which gives you a lot of power. The bad part is that it creates the incentive of “wasting time” or at least that’s what your client may think is going to happen.

Put on your client shoes. Imagine you are paying for a wall to be built in your house and they want you to pay them by the hour. In a certain way, that’s like signing a blank check since you don’t exactly know how much time it would take. Your client could also have no idea how much time it takes to make 12 sound effects or 3 minutes of music. So what would you do? Probably ask for an estimate, right? That’s why charging per hour or per day is tricky.

I personally haven’t used this method much, I think it is best suited for short jobs that are not easy to measure in any other way. It could also be a good option if the client trusts you and knows how you work.

Charging per asset

Usually, this means charging per sound effect and/or per minute of music. Implementation and music mix/recording/production could be included or not. I feel this is a good middle ground method and I have used it quite a bit. It is very flexible since it accounts for additional work that may come up in the development process.

Having said that, it also suffers from the same issue as charging per hour, although the effect is softened. A client could think: ok, I pay per asset but I’m not sure how many assets I need, how much is this going to cost me really? To continue with the analogy, imagine they charge you per brick laid and you know you need a wall but you are not sure how many bricks you will end up needing.

If we think this through, I believe the responsibility lays mostly on the client here. I’m telling you how much I charge per asset so if you don’t know how many you need, that’s understandable but you should at least have an approximation. Since you know my rates, it would not be hard to calculate a final cost range, at least.

The other side of this coin and one of the drawbacks of this method is that it often happens that you feel a certain feature needs a SFX but since the client didn’t specifically ask for it, now it “ could look” like you just want to make that extra SFX for the extra money. 100% of the time in my case I’m just thinking it would be cool to have a sound there and I’m not thinking about the money but you need to consider your client’s perspective. Creating a trusting professional relationship is the best solution to this but that takes time.

Additionally, sometimes in the past I have charged a different rate depending on the complexity of the asset. I have tried things like a 3 tier system: easy, medium & hard and keep track of everything on a spreadsheet. This is something you can try but I don’t think is very useful. In my mind, that way I charge more precisely for my work but in reality what happened is that the easy stuff cancelled out the hard stuff and you end up more or less charging the medium price on average. So I would just charge one price but maybe take this idea into account for some parts of the job that are particularly complicated.

Charging a flat rate per project

With this method we eliminate all uncertainty on the client side but in the process, we move it to our side. I feel this is the easiest way to land a job but at the same time you will probably end up under charging.

There are a few ways to mitigate this. You can make clear how many revisions are included. You can set time limits on certain parts of the job or on the whole thing. You can also try to limit time used (or wasted) on meetings, briefings and emailing back and forth.

In general, your goal with this method is to arrive at a price that is fair and this takes practice. You would need an estimation on the amount of work ahead (number of SFXs or minutes of music) and then you can use your rate to do the math. Adding contingency and at least one revision into the price is a good idea too.

Bidding

Negotiating is an art that is hard to learn but my rule of thumb is to always charge more rather than less. Is better for a client to say no because you are too expensive, rather than say no because they think you are so cheap, you must be a bad choice. Trying to quote higher prices also mitigates the usual tendency creative people have of undervaluing ourselves, particularly at the beginning of our careers.

If you don’t really want to do a gig or you are too busy, it could be a good idea to quote a price that is a bit crazy high. You win either way: if they say no, you didn’t want to do it anyway. If they say yes, maybe at that price it is worth the effort.

On the other hand, sometimes it could be a good idea to under charge a bit if for example you are offered a longer contract and you know there will be a steady influx of work coming. Be careful with this though, nothing is permanent when you are a contractor.

Final note on working for free

Should you work for free? Very controversial topic so I will be brief: never work for nothing. Maybe you won’t always get money out of a project but you must get something. Sometimes learning or networking is worth more than money, especially learning but be extremely careful with this. Working for exposure is usually not worth it though, at least in my opinion.

Doing things like an unpaid internship, participating in a jam or on a small indie project are good ways of learning or networking and they can be a good use of your time, in my opinion. Always ask yourself, is this good for my career? Never forget that your work has value.