Slashdot Mirror
Can the Guitar Games Market Be Resurrected?
donniebaseball23 writes: Thanks to a glut of titles, hardware and precious little innovation, the Guitar Hero and Rock Band craze all but died out by 2010. Now, however, strong rumors are swirling that one if not both franchises will be making a return on the new consoles. But will players care? And will the market once again support these games? Charles Huang, co-creator of Guitar Hero, weighed in, outlining some of the challenges. "First, the music genre attracts a more casual and female audience versus other genres. But the casual gamer has moved from console to mobile," he warned. "Second, the high price point of a big peripheral bundle might be challenging. Casual gamers have a lot of free-to-play options." That said, there could be room for a much smaller guitar games market now, analyst Michael Pachter noted: "It was a $2 billion market in 2008, so probably a $200 million market now. The games are old enough that they might be ready for a re-fresh, and I would imagine there is room for both to succeed if they don't oversaturate the way they did last time."
I've been a drummer for 36 years and my family and I really like to play Guitar Hero, the kids mostly like singing and the drums with the wife playing "bass" and I play "guitar". It's fun for us, a way to have family time where we're all doing something together and support each other. However, having discovered Rocksmith 2014, this drummer is turning into a guitarist :) I still like the relative simplicity of Guitar Hero, but honestly, Rocksmith is more enjoyable on a personal level... Will we buy another incarnation of Guitar Hero? Yea, probably...
You know, my wife will be eternally grateful for Rock Band, et al.
I led a very, er ... musically sheltered life prior to Rockband and Guitar Hero. Wasn't a fan of most forms of rock, couldn't stand metal or punk. Like, at all.
The Rockbank type games taught me a LOT about the melody, structure, and musicality of them; sort of acted as a crash course in understanding why they didn't suck.
Since then I've bought well over a hundred punk albums (literally) and other stuff I previously didn't like since playing the game.
Say what you will about these games ... but in my direct experience, nothing teaches the structure and musicality of a broad range of music as well as these things.
For me and my wife? We'd buy this again in a heartbeat ... because it's a fun game to play in parties, and a friend's wife makes drumming on expert look easy.
So when I'm rocking out to Rise Against in the car, my wife is laughing and saying "Thank god for Rockband". Because without those games, I most certainly wouldn't have been.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I already know how to play real bass and some guitar. I still enjoy playing Rock Band. They're not mutually exclusive.
Learn to play real guitar ..
Or any other instrument. I bought a $150 banjo, a $12 electronic tuner, and a $15 book (ISBN 978-1883206444) about 5 weeks ago. I've only had time to put in about 8 sessions of 30-60 minutes but that's all it took to start sounding somewhat good. I was concerned I would annoy my wife to death but the banjo sounds good even in the hands of a beginner.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
I forget the actual %'s and quote, and couldn't find it, but I remember one of the creators of the guitar game genre explaining that he and his musician friends wanted everyone to experience the fun of being a musician, but knew that becoming one takes a TON of effort.
So, the goal was to give a lot of the fun of being a real musician, but with a fraction of the effort.
Most people that like Rock Band or Guitar Hero don't want to learn how to be a real musician. They just want to have fun, and they do!
My point is, quit trying to point out that they should make it more realistic (real guitars, etc), because that defeats the whole point. If you already know how to play, go play! It will usually be much more fun than Rock Band.
But, if you don't know how to play and don't want to spend years honing your art, just go have fun.
Also, this: http://www.xkcd.com/359/
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
Posting as AC because I don't want Activision lawyers coming out of the woordworks, even if I no longer live in the USA.
Quite honestly, I think the question given in the summary is bunk. Did guitar games go away? Yes, both Guitar Hero and Rock Band got the axe, for two different reasons.
In the case of Rock Band, it went by the wayside because Viacom bailed out of Harmonix, and they no longer had a company to bankroll them. Combine that with a poorly-timed release of Rock Band 3 when music/rhythm games in general were on the decline, and Harmonix's choice of plumbing a nonexistent niche through the "pro" controllers, and you have a recipe for a disaster. Personally, I loved the "pro" keyboard peripheral for Rock Band 3, and in fact I play it as much as I can to this day. The problem is that Harmonix were not willing to commit to providing note tracks for a significant portion of their existing song library for these pro controllers. Given that both Rock Band and Guitar Hero default to a lowest-common-denominator set list when it comes to DLC - if any one person in an online set doesn't have the song, you can't select it - it was perceived by most gamers as punishing players who were not interested in Pro Guitar or Pro Keys. After all, someone who is dead-set on playing Pro Guitar or Pro Keys isn't going to be buying DLC that's largely keys-centric or guitar-centric, respectively. In fact, even after the "pro" peripherals were released in Rock Band 3, Harmonix continued to publish an enormous volume of DLC that in many cases did not even have a note track for the keyboard peripheral. As a result, many people trying to use these new "pro" peripherals ended up being limited to the on-disc songs despite having sunk a considerable amount of money into DLC that favored their instrument, simply because nobody else had them. A song that has a killer keyboard part is unlikely to have a sufficiently challenging guitar part for any guitar players to buy it, and vice-versa.
In Activision's case - and I speak from experience, as I worked on most of the iterations of Guitar Hero for the Wii - it was simple market saturation. Any random gamer who liked the music/rhythm genre could have told Activision why they played Guitar Hero: Because it's fun. It wasn't because of specific bands, it was because it was damned fun. Nevertheless, given that most of Activision's executives likely hadn't picked up a game controller since the late 80's, they paid "market research" companies to tell them what gamers wanted. In reality, what these so-called "market researchers" told Activision was more or less what they wanted to hear: Secure licenses for specific bands, and make games that cater specifically to those bands.
Anyone who has played Guitar Hero could tell you that this was a bad idea, and in fact those of us who were Guitar Hero fans first, and Guitar Hero developers second, screamed at the top of our proverbial lungs that this was faulty reasoning. The average person who is playing Guitar Hero isn't playing it because he likes the bands, he's playing it because he likes music/rhythm games. Similarly, the person who is not playing Guitar Hero is doing so because he's just not interested in music/rhythm games. No amount of band-specific point releases will change that. Ultimately, the executives disagreed, and so Activision set about saturating the market with a new update every three months. Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, Guitar Hero: Van Halen, Guitar Hero: Metallica, and even Guitar Hero: Smash Hits, a game that literally only consisted of songs that were already in Guitar Hero 1 and 2, because god knows Activision had to try to wring more dollars out of people since they only owned the franchise as of Guitar Hero 3. By the time Guitar Hero 5 hit shelves, people had already become numb to Activision's unending flurry of titles, and they largely ignored it. Guitar Hero: "Phoenix", the code name for Guitar Hero 7, was well under development at Vicarious Visions when the final word came in in early February of 2011:
Absolutely agree! How Rock Band jumped the shark ...
1. In Rock Band 1 you could slow the practice speed down to 50% speed. In Rock Band 3 some idiot designer raised this to 70%!? WTF? I'm trying to _learn_ the song. Allow me to slow this down to _25%_ for some of those songs.
2. Give me an option to show me the notes in _actual_ music notation so I can **learn to read music**. I _want_ to see the notes in Treble Cleff and/or Bass Clef.
Color-coding the music was brilliant. Teachers even used it to _actually_ teach students!
3. For the love of god use a _standard_ USB connection.
Stop locking me into your shitty proprietary vendor lock-in peripherals. If I buy a guitar, drums, or keyboard it should work across ALL games and ALL platforms: Xbox360, Xbone, PS3, PS4.
4. Stop the bullshit "No Export" option. WTF can't I export it from Rock Band 2 and import it into Rock Band 3 if I own *both* ??
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
5. Provide the band's famous song(s) not their shitty unknown songs of bands we love.
Why can't we buy Journey's "Any Way You Want It"?? We're stuck with the crappy: "Don't Stop Believing"
And now we can't even buy that??
* http://www.rockbandaide.com/20...
Greed ruined the music games.