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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."
Same game, but plugs in to your electric guitar and teaches you to play while you play.
Can't this be said about any video game that doesn't include unrealistic activity? Why not just drive cars? Why not just play football? Why not chuck rocks at pigs?
Why not become a CIA operative and get shot in the head in a Russian airport in a shocking but easily predictable double-cross?
I already know how to play real bass and some guitar. I still enjoy playing Rock Band. They're not mutually exclusive.
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: