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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."
Learning guitar takes a lot of patience, especially early on.
I think that's why you don't see guitar a lot in school.. most instruments you can get people transitioning between a few notes pretty quickly, then can get everyone together and honk out "twinkle twinkle little star". With guitar this takes a little longer. There are a lot of fundamentals you need before you can progress to anything beyond very simple tunes.. and getting these fundamentals can be very tedious.
Wrapping up the hours and hours of scales and building muscle memory in a game might encourage some people to pick up music who otherwise wouldn't have the patience. Personally (as a non elitist type) I think this is a good thing.