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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."
I would imagine some partner in the music business would be better than partnering with MTV.
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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.
any sort of skills you develop with these games are pointless for playing actual music
When did the point of any game become to prepare your for the real life equivalent (ok, there are actually some examples, but moving on..)
We have flight games, driving games, a whole variety of sports and military games, however for some reason people hold music sacred. Learning to play a real instrument is a major endeavor that takes a lot of time and patience but (and I know this sounds kinda lame) brings a lifetime of joy. I am sure the same can be said about flying a plane, driving a race car, playing professional sports, etc.
I play (real) guitar.. but I can still enjoy playing a fake plastic guitar with some friends (and copious beer). It's not the same as a jam session, but its not supposed to be.. it's a game!
I think it's also worth noting that Rockband 3 is going to include some kind of modified (real) guitar to be used in professional mode. This might actually have teaching implications. The irony of it is that rock band might actually encourage people to learn a real instrument, rather than prevent them from doing so by providing a "close enough" experience (which I think is where a lot of the early hatred for rockband came from).
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.
The Fender Squier is a real guitar. On a promotional event a guy had it hooked up to an amplifier while also being connected to the game, so you could actually hear his playing while the tune also rolled in Rock Band 3. Check the (rather cool) demonstration/teaser video on Fenders website.
In other words, if you go for the Fender Squier, Rock Band 3 will function as a learning tool. That games career mode is more about challenges rather than just plauying at venues. Different difficulty levels (where the hardest setting equals the way the guitarist is actually playing the current song), tutorials and the ability to slow down sections at will makes it possible to get down to business learning how a guitar produces sound. If you take the time, you will be able to learn to play. The only thing the game doesn't teach specifically is technique, but with the songs including (and the game supporting) hammerons/pulloffs, left hand muting, open chords, arpeggios, sustained notes and slides, the techniques will come eventually as long as one is eager and willing to learn.
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.'"
I started with RB1, knowing NOTHING about drums or pretty much any instruments really.
By the time RB2 came along, I bought an electronic drumset (Alesis) that I hooked up via a custom wireless controller and started playing that pretty much exclusively (3 symbals, 4 pads, etc...). I got my first real drumset a month ago, and I can tell you that both beats and hand/feet independence carry perfectly well over. Perfectly. In fact, the acoustic drumset is in many ways easier than the electronic one: the "pads" are bigger, and the sound much fuller so you don't need to be as precise.
People saying that RB doesn't teach drumming are full of shit. In fact, not only does it teach you drumming, it teaches you different styles of drumming as well. From Keith Moon's footwork-as-symbals to Mitch Mitchell's technique, you can learn it all if you take the time. Yeah you're copying, but over time it becomes second nature and you pick up a number of different rolls, fills and other techniques from many drummers.