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Viacom To Sell Rock Band Creator Harmonix
UgLyPuNk tips news that Harmonix, the game developer behind Rock Band and the early Guitar Hero games, will be sold by parent company Viacom, signaling the media conglomerate's exit from the console game market. Quoting Wired:
"The news is yet another ominous sign for the music-game business, which exploded seemingly overnight in 2005 with the release of Guitar Hero. ...sales have been in free fall since the dizzying heights of 2008, with Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock moving only 86,000 copies in its first week... Thus far in calendar year 2010, the balance sheet seems to show that Harmonix has been a $300 million liability for Viacom. And it doesn’t look like Viacom believes in the long-term future of music games. With any luck, the company will find a buyer that can help Harmonix grow, but it’s hard to imagine a better partner in the music biz than MTV."
What happened is that they exploited that genre to exhaustion.
The "real" controller, the one most people are waiting for, won't come out until March 1, 2011. That'd be the actual Squire Strat that works with Rock Band. I know a lot of people holding off buying RB3 Pro-Mode DLC for a while, until around when this guitar comes out, and some are even waiting for a while to get the game. Hopefully stuff gets sorted out quickly with the future of the franchise, because a lot of people ARE still invested in the game, and the company, but the lack of details is making gamers more nervous than geeks were when Oracle bought Sun... because Rock Band actually does do a fair bit in terms of building transferable skills to real instruments - with Pro Drums, Pro Keys, and eventually Pro Guitar (and with Pro Guitar right now to an extent with their "pro controller" - good for hand positions... but not great). And as a drummer myself - the drumming skills really aren't bad. I play on a stock RB2 kit, with the cymbal expansions - and even though my kit in real life lays out different, has a different number of parts, etc - Rock Band still holds you to a tempo, and builds limb independence. It's not everything you need to be a good drummer, but it helps - and the stock pedal, though nothing like the real thing, is actually pretty good at building leg muscle and if you can heel-toe on that, you can do it even better on the real thing. So... yeah.
Rock Band is doing fine, it's Guitar Hero that's doing so poorly. And it's doing so poorly because they followed the Activision strategy of pushing out a new game every six months, which is actually the exact same game that was previously released. Between 2006 and 2010, twenty-two (22) Guitar Hero-branded games were released - about one every three months. Granted, this was across multiple platforms. If we look at console only, there were only eleven unique Guitar-Hero branded games during this time frame. Still way too many. The simple fact is that they flooded the market, and killed off their own brand.
Why not just buy a damn guitar, man? With as much effort as you put into this, you could do it for real.
You missed the whole point, and thus your comment is a gigantic waste of time. It *is* a guitar. It's a Squier Stratocaster, aka a basic Fender guitar, with a MIDI interface. I don't know if you've ever seen the Yamaha MIDI pickup but it's like $200 used and it blows. We're talking about a whole guitar with a MIDI interface for $250. On Pro mode, you have to play all the notes. That means that you can buy the guitar, move up through the modes and learn to play a real guitar, because you'll be playing real songs on a real guitar.
In addition, RB3 also supports two other real instruments, keyboards and drums. You can buy the MIDI connection kit and then connect your actual, professional MIDI keyboard and drums. I have a Casio with basic teaching features which are horribly annoying to use. I have a 360. With RB3 and the MIDI kit, I can have the computer teach me to play the keyboard, starting with basic rhythm games and working my way up to playing actual parts, all on my real keyboard.
I know, I know, stupid idea, I shouldn't have even contradicted the zeitgeist of USA 2010.
No, it was a stupid comment, because you don't know what you're talking about but posted one anyway.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"