What do Tony Hawk Pro Skater, Grand Theft Auto, and Fallout all have in common?
Answer: I would more than gladly pay for DLC that added more songs/radio content to the games.
It’s so absurdly simple, but if I could pay five to ten bucks a game to double the soundtrack I know I would.
Why is it that in game music DLC has never been attempted?
Is it the licensing?
Am I alone here?
In FIFA games you can buy more songs with premium currency
Probably because the licensing costs make it not worthwhile.
And the fact that most of these games offer some way to add your very own music tracks.
I can certainly see that for Grandtheft auto, but there’s no way licensing is that expensive for songs from the 40s and 50s for fall out, or punk rock songs for Tony hawk pro skater.
i’m dead certain Ian MacKaye would license out some minor threat songs for $50 and a pizza.
I am inclined however to think that they might not do it simply because it’s a pain to write up all those contracts, But then again, isn’t that why most companies keep lawyers on retainer?
Once upon the time, it was not possible to buy hitman 3: contracts anymore because license for one of the songs had expired.
Honestly, I’ve only seen this sort of dlc in beat saber and cities skylines.
And in beat saber it largely looked like an attempt to milk players for more money and not provide a worthwhile experience.
If I see a Bethesda game included in a comparison my usual thought is “Oh, it must be a buggy mess”. 
It is the licensing. The only way to continually provide the music is to continually pay for it or own it. Even rockstar had to remove tracks in the end.
And the games ended up ‘worse off’ because of the bad image that creates, and I can only imagine it’s a logistical nightmare for the devs too.
Now imagine that with DLC. Imagine having to take away DLC that players have paid for.
if it somehow became a thing, then what would happen is the next cycle of games would come with 1% of the music -you’d be tired after 20 minutes hearing the same songs on repeat - and you’d have to purchase in game credits which come in packets of 1000, and one packet equates to $3 of real money, and a new song cost $5.
Some of the old gamers would complain, maybe a few even stop playing the crap and venture outside, but it doesn’t matter because 10 year olds are the target and they are not smarter than a dog.
Sadly true.
Well, you’re not getting a contract for $50 and a pizza. But also, Ian might be cool with it, but I’m sure Ian has an agent / publisher / whatever, and they might not see it that way.
Some years ago my studio was doing a little freebie job for a local event, and we asked a band if we could use a piece of their music in it. The band manager’s response was in line with “$50 and a pizza”, but the decision was up to the band’s agent, who wasn’t willing to do any more than give us discount on the track’s rather hefty licensing cost.
You mention songs from the 40s and 50s, too. You could well be right that the average song from back then could be licensed for a pittance. The thing is that you probably don’t want an average song from the 40s in your game. The ones you want in your game are the ones which have retained popularity and recognition for 8 decades. I could be wrong, but I suspect that some of those are still pretty expensive to use.
The other thing is that if someone is going to go and pay for licenses to music people actually want to hear to put it in their games as DLC, at some point they’ll have to answer the question “why would players buy the music from us instead of from iTunes or whatever?” and also “are we sure this is the set of tracks players will want to pay for?”
As someone who buys both video games and music, with exceptions such as Rocksmith, I would not buy music in a game which I could instead buy as normal music. If I want to hear Muse’s latest while I go skating or whatever then I cal already easily do that, and while it’s not as nicely integrated, it’s probably not worth the price of an album to address. Going in the other direction, I have separately purchased some video game soundtracks so that I can hear them outside of the game, and that does appear to be a pretty common option - OST albums coming as upsells in “deluxe” editions, or as separate purchases, or streamable on relevant services, and so on.
Sounds like the true answer to this question is why don’t more games have functionality to integrate with your Spotify or whatnot?
Hell a game that can hook into Winamp would have my money.
dont all the consoles have a built in music player / apps like spotify, and on pc you can play youtube or w/e you want in the background.
On PC, yeah. I just play Winamp in the background. Only console I have is a Switch and that sounds way too smart for Nintendo to integrate.
But being built into the game itself would be the best experience, as the game itself would have full control. Think a racing game where it starts up your favourite track at the beginning of a race (I know some racing game can actually do this, mind you).
That said if it’s at the console level, then perhaps there’s an API games can use so they don’t need to reinvent the wheel.
Ideas ideas…
Winamp has been defunct since 2013, even though there’s a rumor for a comeback.
THe point is, many music services wouldn’t want to be integrated into a game, as they either harvest metadata or present adverts. And for player integration there’d need to be a common API for all music player.
Defunct but still the music player of choice for anyone who doesn’t want to use Spotify or Itunes.
Which is to say, an awful lot of people.
Yeah. To my mind the “integration” would involve things such as volume ducking during dialog, fading music out on game-over screens, and other such things so that it doesn’t interfere with the non-music parts of a game’s audio design.
Actually, I think that’s pretty much it - an extra layer of volume control.
Try foobar2000.
You can also check out one of the “opensource music player” articles.
I’m still using it, works fine for me.
I think there are mods for fallout that replace the entire music and hook into the ingame integration features that you mention.
https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/categories/34/
I do think you are pretty much alone here. The average gamer would perceive it as unneccessary price gouging and would review bomb and/or boycott the game for it. It would likely be a net loss on the bottom line in my opinion.