Nah man, I didn't take it as dickish at all... that's pretty much the harsh reality of it and it makes sense - it's a tough industry after all. Think I'll look into composing indie. Thanks for the tips!
Jeremy Soule is great. In fact, he's probably a larger source of inspiration to me than I'd like to admit. Morrowind's soundtrack is probably my favorite, but there's some absolutely fantastic music in Skyrim as well. Never really played Oblivion but had to add the soundtrack to my collection, where it fits perfectly.
From a technical point of view, I don't think there's much to how his music is used in the games. It's just based on the location of the player and whether or not the player is in battle; I think there's an ambient layer that plays along the soft tracks as well. Effective but pretty simple for a modern game.
Btw, here's a little something I wrote last year that was chosen as one of the demo tracks for Realitone, you might hear some Soule influences there (I hope not too much though! Also it's mastered sort of quiet), obviously it's nowhere near as good as his stuff but hey.
https://soundcloud.com/realitone/olli-salonen-the-absence?in=realitone/sets/realivox-demos
