Hello. I am looking for recent (past few years) very rough, general ballpark audio outsourcing costs in different sized projects, for services such as foley, sound design, dialogue, implementation. Don't take this the wrong way, I am not looking to find out how much you charge or have spent personally. I am just wondering if there is maybe some website with statistics such as this, in recent years, for my research use. I know for example there is a guy here who puts together info on audio wages & work etc. Thanks :)

I have collected data on this topic, I expect to release the data sometime in June or July--there's a lot of it and I will need to sort through it all to make sure I'm handling the data properly.

Is there a specific question you'd like to ask? I could probably put together a very rough answer for you.

What I am hoping to find out is an averaged figure that mid scale games roughly spend on outsourced audio services - sound effects, dialogue & audio implementation, ideally with music excluded. Such as "mid scale games spend anywhere from - to - on outsourced audio services" or something like that.

May be difficult I know.

My data is from the perspective of the audio professional who rarely has whole insight into budgets for audio depts/outsourcing.

If you want to ask me how much the average freelance sound designer makes, I can help you. If you want to ask how much an average freelance sound designer makes on a console game, I can help you.

Ok yeah the average & higher end sound designer income (not including expense deductions) would be great actually

Since I've already been asked a similar question, here's the question and then the answer:

Quote: Did you get an even amount of responses from sound designers who are working inhouse vs freelancers?

My reply was thus:

Quote: Even? No, I had, if I recall, over 60% of the respondents reporting that they were in-house, and something like 30% of the respondents reporting that they worked freelance sound design with about a 12% overlap between the two.

Of the Freelance Sound Designers who also worked In-House last year, their In-house salary ranged between 3.9k to 80k with an average of about 49-50k. Within that same group, the reported Freelance Sound Design salaries for all of last year ranged from 85 measley dollars to 65k last year and averaged around 13-14k. Definitely shows that these cats are supplimenting their In-House income with side design work.

In total, from all of the freelance sound designers, the salary range was from 50 dollars to 365k last year with an average of about 23-24k--ouch for the freelancers.

About 94% of the In-House folks reported having to do In-House Sound Design tasks. Among them, their salaries ranged from that low-ball 3.9k to 150k with an average salary of around 63.4k.

Though, I should mention, as many have started to notice, "out-house" audio design is becoming popular in these hard times since overhead for a contracting company is nominal.

Like I said, these numbers are rough, and outliers and possibly erroneous responses need to be dealt with accordingly.

Hope that helps though,
- Dan

Thanks mate