A co-worker today was all excited because her husband got her a Wii for her birthday. I of course proceded to rant against the Wii for the next half hour and completely made her wish she had not mentioned the thing to begin with. I'm very sorry I did this, but it is sadly how I feel. Casual games are taking away budgets from "real" games and are making the overall gaming panorama worse for everybody involved. With that said, I feel that I have not talked much about a little phenomenon that has been going on for the last two years. Guitar Hero and it's latest (greatest) competitor Rock Band. If you haven't heard of these games I really think you are better off and I wont worry about mentioning them to you. Odds are you have so here is my take on them. Enjoy them while you can, pick the one you like the most, forget about the 'competition'. If you have not bought a game yet, wait until they really make an announcement on it. Activision and Harmonix will try their best to ruin this genre for everyone by releasing more and more SKUs and while Harmonix has been calling RockBand a 'platform' all this time I really don't see it. Yet. Guitar Hero was there first, the first game was a mild success but got enough people exicited for Guitar Hero 2 which was a complete breakout hit. Activision saw this and immediately started preparing Guitar Hero III and MTV/Harmonix saw an opportunity. Guitar Hero was great but it was mainly about the guitar, actually, it was ONLY about the guitar. Then came RockBand, which promised to expand the genre with the addition of a microphone and a drum set. These both sold like hot cakes. Then of course came this year and how they needed to have new products again Rock Band made their "instruments" better in Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero played catch-up adding all those instruments to their line-up with their Guitar Hero World Tour. Rock Band retailed in the US for $180 for the complete set and it was not 100% compatible with Guitar Hero and vice versa. Rock Band songs were transferable to Rock Band 2, but only after paying a fee. Guitar Hero... well, you're out of luck unless all your DLC is Metallica's 'Death Magnetic'. (Wow, I never thought I'd mention that shitty band on my blog) Additionally to that, it seems like if you are a very well known band, you will get your own game, your own, individual, $40-50 game. Proven by Guitar Hero: Aerosmith and the yet-to-be-named Beatles game by Harmonix. Activision (who refuses to release Brütal Legend because it is not a game they can make a sequel of immediately) has already said that there will be twice as many 'Guitar Hero' SKUs next year as there were this year. I am going to take a step back and talk about what I think they should do, and then I'll talk about what they are doing. They should build the next iTunes. I would not mind paying 50 cents or a whole other dollar additionally to what I already pay if you make this music available for me on my iPod. With the amount of media you are selling through these games everybody would make a killing and everybody wins. Music would be something you discover while playing, and when you like something you put it in your iPod and you share with your friends. The RIAA has been looking for an iTunes killer to get them back more control over their music. This is that. Secondly, stop bickering over the controllers. Take a cue from Sony and Microsoft and leave the peripheral building to third parties. You can make your own controllers to bundle, don't get me wrong. But make your games compatible with each other so that you can start licensing your name to the plastic toy manufacturers. That way you spend more money on the game than you do on the development of the plastic toys that go with it, you take a kickback from the licensing of your name for a drumset to say 'compatible with x game' and thirdly, you dont alienate the players that bought the competitor's game and want to buy your game too. My next point was about how I disliked that the Beatles and Aerosmith were getting their own individual releases and how I think that they can be specially priced packs for the main games, but really I think what I mean is... I don't want to have a billion games I have to switch between just because I want to see Aerosmith in the background of the music tab and I want to play Yellow Submarine. If I buy Guitar Hero Aerosmith make it so that I get a special download code that lets me get all the Aerosmith content inside my copy of Guitar Hero World Tour. Its the same game, with a few character changes, It can co-exist. Also it takes away any real re-sale value of the game, only people who buy new copies can get this new DLC that lets them access the well-known artists from within the main game. This will really take away a lot of the fatigue I think people will start to feel. Finally, numbers of both Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero World Tour are out and they are less than stellar. I don't know who thought people would be willing to pay $200 every year for a set of plastic toys but the market has spoken and I guess they were wrong. Make mayor revisions to the game every 2 years and create content packs for $15-20 every few months. I would love new venues or new countries and of course new challenges, but I would not want to have to buy a whole new set of plastic toys to do it. I think Activision and Harmonix will not listen to what I just listed, they will continue to push their products out in more frequent intervals even. They will make a lot of money, but they will completely ruin the genre and will end up losing money because they were not able to really stretch it out for as long as they could have. Just like the fighting games in the 90s and the shooters of today, people are getting a little tired of the same-old, every 9 months.
Rock Band, Guitar Hero & The Future of Music Games
· 5 min read