A buyer does not purchase "game audio." They purchase a folder they can import before dinner and drop on a button, a footstep, or a gunshot. If that folder is named New_Folder_final, the text file says "free for personal use," and half the clips are the same click bounced in stereo, the listing is not a product yet. It is a backup of a session.
Selling starts after the sound exists. The questions that decide the sale are duller than synthesis: which counter already has game developers standing at it, what the zip must contain so nobody emails you, which sentence in the license lets them ship a paid game, and what a $20 price becomes after the store is paid.
The rates below were taken from each company's own publisher or help pages in October 2026. Fee schedules move. Open the page again on the day you upload.
Where do game developers already buy sounds?
Five counters cover almost every indie purchase. They do not find the same buyer, and they do not keep the same slice of the price.
Unity Asset Store. The store sits inside the Unity editor, which is why a tools-and-audio pack can sell without a separate audience. Unity's publisher FAQ says there is no fee to publish, you retain 70% of revenue earned, the minimum price of an asset is $4.99, and the store reaches over 1.7 million monthly users. The same page says you own the content and Unity is the platform distributing it. That is not a promise that every line of the publisher agreement is non-exclusive. Read the agreement before you offer another store an exclusive window. Payouts are in USD only, monthly through PayPal or quarterly by bank transfer, after a tax interview. Some tax authorities require withholding.
Fab. Epic's marketplace pays publishers 88% of the revenue from product sales. Payment goes out about 30 days after the end of a month in which the amount to be paid is at least $100. A smaller month rolls forward until that threshold is met. Fab is not limited to Unreal projects, so a WAV pack is not locked to one engine. Their public payout page does not add a second processing percentage on top of the 12% they keep. Use 88% as the published share, then read the distribution agreement you actually sign.
itch.io. You choose the revenue share, from 0% to 100%. itch.io's payments documentation calls this open revenue sharing and uses 10% as the default in its worked example. There is no review queue, which also means a broken preview is public the hour you click save. Buyers are already shopping for game assets, but the page does not inherit Unity's in-editor traffic. You still pay the card processor. EU VAT depends on the payout mode you pick: "Direct to you" makes you the merchant of record; "Collected by itch.io" makes itch the merchant and remits the VAT.
Gumroad, or any direct checkout. Useful once someone already has your link: a devlog, a YouTube description, a post. It is a weak first shelf, because almost nobody browses Gumroad looking for a footstep library. Gumroad's fee page charges 10% + $0.50 on a sale through your own link, and that figure does not include card processing, which they list separately as 2.9% + $0.30. A sale that arrives through Gumroad Discover is a flat 30%, processing included. After $20,000 of paid sales in a calendar month, new direct sales that month drop to 5% + $0.50. Discover stays at 30%.
AudioJungle. This is Envato Market's audio counter, so the buyers are video editors and app teams as well as game developers. From 1 July 2026 Envato put every Market author on one non-exclusive model: a 50% author fee, and permission to sell the same items elsewhere. The fee applies to the item price, not automatically to the number printed on the product page. Envato's earnings article, updated 7 September 2026, walks a $16 purchase with a $3 buyer fee and 10% withholding down to $5.20 for the author. The buyer fee is not the same in every category. Do not copy a music pack's arithmetic onto a sound-effect listing until you have priced that item type.
Developers pay when sorting free downloads would cost them the evening. What they are avoiding is covered from the buyer side in free versus paid game sound effects. A listing has to beat that evening: a clear license, a matched set, and filenames a stranger can search.
What do you keep from a $20 sale?
Twenty dollars is a normal price for a small mechanic pack. It is large enough that the fixed per-sale fees show up, and small enough that a percentage point is not abstract. These are illustrations from the published rates above, before your income tax, on a $20 price. They are not a screenshot from a payout report.
| Store | Published cut | You keep on $20 |
|---|---|---|
| Unity Asset Store | You retain 70%. No publish fee. | $14.00 |
| Fab | 88% of sales revenue. Pays out once the month reaches $100. | $17.60 |
| itch.io | 10% default in their docs, then $0.30 + 2.9% processing. | $17.12 |
| Gumroad, your link | 10% + $0.50, plus 2.9% + $0.30 card processing. | $16.62 |
| Gumroad Discover | 30% flat, processing included. | $14.00 |
| AudioJungle / Envato Market | 50% author fee on the item price, plus a buyer fee and possible withholding. Not half of the sticker. | Use their calculator. Their $16 example paid $5.20. |
The itch.io line uses the same formula as their $10 example, which they publish as $8.41 at a 10% share: price, minus their share, minus $0.30, minus 2.9%. On $20 that is $20 − $2.00 − $0.30 − $0.58 = $17.12. Set the share to 0% and the processor fee remains. Gumroad's direct line is $2.00 + $0.50 + $0.58 + $0.30 = $3.38 in fees, so $16.62 left.
Fixed fees punish a $5 pack harder than a $20 pack. Unity will not let the price go under $4.99, and 70% of $4.99 is $3.49 before any withholding. On Gumroad, $0.50 plus card processing is already a large piece of a $5 sale. A mini pack can still be the right first product. It is a bad product to sell only through a checkout that charges a flat half-dollar.
Fab's $17.60 does not arrive the next morning. If October's earnings are $17.60, Epic's documentation says that balance rolls until unpaid revenue reaches $100. Unity can withhold for tax even though the headline rate is 70%. Envato's author fee is half the item price, and the item price is the list price minus the buyer fee. Treat "50%" and "half of what the customer paid" as different numbers.
What belongs in the zip?
A game project unzips once. The person importing is often not the person who bought it, and they will not open a video to learn your naming scheme. This tree is enough for a small interface set:
interface_clicks_v1/
license.txt
readme.txt
preview/
preview.mp3
wav/
ui_hover_01.wav
ui_hover_02.wav
ui_press_01.wav
ogg/
ui_hover_01.ogg
ui_hover_02.ogg
ui_press_01.ogg
WAV is the master. 16-bit PCM at 44.1 kHz is a safe delivery for short effects. 48 kHz is the other rate people ask for when the rest of the project is already at 48. Pick one rate for the whole pack and write it in the readme. Mixed rates in one folder produce imports that do not match. An Ogg Vorbis copy is worth shipping beside the WAV, in its own folder, for teams who would rather not compress 200 files by hand. How far a short effect can shrink before the attack dulls is a separate decision, covered in reducing sound effect file size.
Do not ship MP3 as the file they import. MP3 is a frame format. On a click that lasts a few dozen milliseconds, the padding shows up as a small gap and a softer attack. An MP3 preview on the store page is fine. The button in the game should get the WAV or the Ogg.
Mono when the sound sits on an object. Footsteps, hits, pickups, and most UI clicks should be mono. A stereo footstep often plays as a fixed left-right image instead of coming from the character. Keep stereo for a designed explosion, a whoosh that already has width, or a short stinger that is meant to stay in the center of the mix. Put mono or stereo in the filename or the folder. The store description is not open at import time.
Cut the dead air. Leave a few milliseconds so the transient is not clipped, then stop the file. A one-second WAV that is silent for most of that second wastes memory and makes the feedback feel late. Loops are the exception. The end has to meet the start, and the readme should say the file loops, and how long it is, so nobody trims "silence" that is actually the crossfade.
Names, takes, and one loudness
fs_wood_run_03.wav can be searched. wood3_final_NEW.wav cannot. Lower case, underscores, a two-digit take number, no spaces. Group by the action the code will call, not by the day you bounced the session.
One take of a repeated action becomes a metronome. Four to eight takes, close in length and level but not copies, are what a gameplay programmer is paying for. Reversing take 01 and labeling it take 02 is audible, and it is the sort of thing that earns a refund. How many variations a running character actually needs is discussed in building a sound variation system. For a pack, the practical bar is simpler: every take in a set should survive being played in random order without one of them sticking out as louder, longer, or obviously flipped.
Write the peak you aimed for. "Peaks between −1 dBFS and −3 dBFS, no file limited into mush" tells the buyer the hover and the error were leveled together. If one file sits 15 dB under the others, the mix is wrong on the first playtest, and the buyer assumes the pack is unfinished.
What should the license say?
"Royalty-free" means the buyer does not owe you money per copy of their game. It does not mean the download was free, and it does not mean they own the recording. Put the rest in license.txt, in sentences a producer can read on one screen. The block below is a working draft for a direct sale, not a lawyer's document. If the pack is sold on Unity or Fab, that store's buyer agreement may already answer some of these, and your file should not contradict it.
Unity's support article on commercial use of Asset Store assets is the buyer's version of the same deal: most assets can go into a commercial game on a royalty-free basis, and they may not be resold as assets. Your license should be at least that clear.
- The licensor's name. A studio name or your own. Not "the author."
- What they may do. Use the sounds, edited or as shipped, in games, apps, film, and other finished works, including commercial ones, with no further royalty. Say whether a credit line is required. If it is, give the exact words. "Credit me somehow" starts arguments.
- What they may not do. Resell the files, upload the zip, or drop the raw sounds into someone else's sample library. Using a click inside a game is the product. Selling the click again is not.
- How many projects. "Any project this buyer ships" and "one game" are different offers. If you sell both, they need different prices and different filenames on the license.
- Who on the team may use the files. Indie games are built by contractors who were not the person at checkout. "The seat that paid" strands the audio programmer. "This project, including contractors hired to work on it" matches the way a build is actually made. A publisher, a porting studio, or a second company is a separate sentence. Decide it on purpose.
- You keep the copyright. They get a license.
- A refund ends the license, and they should stop using the files in new work. Say that in the same file, so the store's refund button and your terms are not two stories.
Do not stick a Creative Commons badge on a paid pack unless you mean that badge. CC BY-NC does not allow a commercial game, so it cannot be the license for a commercial sound library either. CC0 allows redistribution, including by another seller. Neither one is a normal paid-pack deal.
Price the job, not the hours
The hours a sound took are not on the page. A click that took a morning and a footstep set that took a Saturday can sit in the same price band if they solve the same size of problem for the person importing them.
One action family, 16 to 40 files. Interface clicks, or pickups, or jumps. On Unity the floor is $4.99. On itch.io this size of pack is easy to understand around $5 to $12. A $30 price on a first product asks for trust you have not earned with other packs yet.
One game system, done properly. Wood, stone, metal, and grass, each with walk, run, and land, four takes each, is 48 files and a reason to exist. The design differences between those surfaces are laid out in footstep sounds for grass, metal, and wood. A pack that has already made those choices, leveled them, and named them is often listed in the teens or the twenties. That is not an average from a survey. It is the point where recording four floors yourself starts to look like the more expensive option.
A library is a folder tree, not a large number. "1,000 SFX" made from one explosion and a pile of gain changes gets returned. "180 files, 12 weapons, fire, reload, and dry-fire, mono WAV" can be checked against the zip. Libraries can be $40, $80, or more. The preview and the file list have to prove the count before the price does any work.
Sell the same pack in one curated store and from one direct link before you maintain five listings. Five stores means five descriptions that drift, and a license sentence that you update in only four of them.
Files that do not belong in a paid pack
The sounds you can license are the sounds you made, or the sounds whose license explicitly lets you resell them as a library. Everything else is how listings get pulled.
A download from a free archive is not your catalog. A non-commercial file cannot go into a commercial game, so it cannot go into a pack you charge for. Even a CC0 clip is a poor thing to resell unchanged: the buyer can fetch it from the original page, and stores expect the uploader to be the creator. How those licenses differ, from the side of someone downloading rather than selling, is in where to find free game sound effects legally.
A rip from someone else's game, a film line, or a song you do not control is not a field recording you own. Recording your own doors, surfaces, and props is slower and it is actually yours. The practical version of that session is the field recording guide for game audio.
Generated audio depends on the tool's terms, and those terms are not all "you may sell this as stock." Some allow commercial use of the output. Some forbid resale. Some stores want the listing to say the clip was generated. The buyer-side map of that problem is the copyright and licensing guide for AI-generated game audio. If the tool does not clearly allow the output to be sold as a sound library, leave the file out. A takedown costs more than the pack.
Do not title a listing after a living product's trademark sound. A short click in a familiar pitch range is ordinary interface design. "The exact lock sound from that phone" is a complaint with a form attached.
The preview is the product page
Play the files, in order, dry, with a little air between them. Thirty to forty-five seconds is enough for a mini pack. A music bed under the effects hides the only thing on the page the buyer came to judge. Put the folder tree in the description. Put the file count, the channel format, and the sample rate in the first screen, not in a comment on page two.
Name the pack the way a developer searches. People look up a coin sound effect, a jump sound effect, or a hit sound effect. They do not look up "ludic feedback assets." "8-bit pickups: coin, gem, 1-up" can be found. "Retro Game Audio Kit Vol. 3" is a shelf label.
Tags should be the same words as the folders: ui, click, hover, error, footstep, wood, laser, 8-bit, wav, mono. Adding forty unrelated tags to borrow weapon traffic for a menu pack does not make the menu pack show up for the right search. It makes the preview feel like a mismatch the moment it plays.
On Unity, budget the review. The publisher FAQ says a submission is checked against the submission guidelines before it is listed. itch.io and a direct checkout can be public the same day, which means you hear a broken file from a stranger the same day too. Fix the filename they mention, and write the change in the description. A one-line changelog is more convincing than a new adjective.
If you are still deciding whether a confirm should be a short high tick or a soft low one, settle that before you bounce eight variations of the wrong idea. Play the candidate against silence, ten times. If it turns into noise by the sixth press, it will not survive a menu. Sketching that test in a browser sound effect generator is enough to pick a direction. The design of each interface event, separate from the store listing, is the subject of how to design game UI sounds. The listing starts after that choice, when the takes match.
A 24-file interface pack you can actually finish
The first public zip does not need to be a catalog. Six events, four takes each:
- hover, press, back, toggle on, error, success
- hover and press stay short, well under about 150 milliseconds, so they finish before the next click
- error and success may run longer, and they should be over before the player has read the message twice
- mono WAV, 16-bit, 44.1 kHz, peaks gathered between about −3 dBFS and −1 dBFS
- an ogg/ folder with the same names, if you want a lighter import
- license.txt with the seven answers above: commercial use included, raw resale excluded, credit not required
- readme.txt with the count (24), the rate, and one line on what each event is for
- a dry preview that plays all 24
Price that zip at $6 to $10 where the store allows it, and at $4.99 if Unity is the only counter and this is the whole product. Ship it in one place you do not control (Unity, Fab, or AudioJungle) only after the folder already exists, and keep a direct link for people who come from your own page. The second pack can be footsteps or weapons. The first pack only has to be a folder a stranger can import without writing to you.