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."

Music business?

[haystor]

I would imagine some partner in the music business would be better than partnering with MTV.

Re:required peripherals

[cutegigi]

well... I dont think being very good in driving game will make you any good driving in real life either...

Ominous sign my ass

[GrumblyStuff]

What happened is that they exploited that genre to exhaustion.

Re:required peripherals

[kevinmenzel]

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.

Re:Note to your ass.

[Ruke]

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.

Re:required peripherals

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:required peripherals

[Anonymous Coward]

For the most part I agree with the whole "any sort of skills you develop are pointless for real music". As a drummer I was fairly impressed with the drums ability to simulate with 4 pads and a kick pedal a real drum set. I mean, yeah playing rock band is different than playing my real kit in the garage, however... playing the game on expert gives a basic sense of timing and coordination. Lots of the beats and fills you play in the game can be taken to the kit for real and will sound good. Will it make you the next Buddy Rich or Bernard Purdie... no... but if you can play RB drums on expert you will be able to use it to get some decent beats going on a real set. Now it will not teach you rudiments, or dynamics or hand/feet independence... you have to have a real kit for those things.

Re:required peripherals

[somersault]

Seeing as tyres are the most important part of the simulation, I'm pretty sure all games do that. The self aligning torque is presumably only really important when you have a force feedback steering wheel, but games have been doing that for years too.

I learned to drive rear wheel drive cars in computer games. I now have a rear wheel drive car IRL and the reactions I've learned in game do carry over fine to the real car for controlling power oversteer etc.

Re:required peripherals

[IndustrialComplex]

Why not just buy a damn guitar, man? With as much effort as you put into this, you could do it for real. I know, I know, stupid idea, I shouldn't have even contradicted the zeitgeist of USA 2010.

To misuse an old spice quote. Experience is everything.

So do you go to war zones instead of playing Call of Duty? Did you go out and buy an F1 racer instead of playing that racing game? Did you post on Slashdot instead of interacting with a person in real life?

Re:required peripherals

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:Music business?

[haystor]

As a casual player who can't hit that 5th button on a regular basis, I don't need expansions.

What I really need is for the jump from medium to hard to be the same difficulty with an extra button, instead of a huge jump in difficulty in addition to the extra button.

I have no rhythm, so I don't need to buy more songs I can't get past.

Re:Note to your ass.

[Dorkmaster Flek]

Rock Band 2, maybe. However, there were tweaks to the core engine and scoring that would invalidate the leaderboard scores, and fairly major interface changes that were much welcomed in RB2. RB3 though, I don't see how you can argue that a new game wasn't necessary. The interface is literally completely different in every conceivable way, an entirely new instrument was added (keyboards) and an entirely new mode based around getting as close to a real instrument as possible within the game was created. That stuff could simply not have been done with a simple patch.

Re:Note to your ass.

[Anonymous Coward]

And Rock Band is just better than Guitar Hero.

Re:required peripherals

[delinear]

I can't speak for GP, but a lot of people find learning an instrument a very dry and, until you start getting good, largely unrewarding process. If they can make that process a little more interesting and fun by tying it to a game interface, where's the harm in that? You're still learning, but it feels less like you're hitting the same chord repeatedly for hours with no reward, because you'll be earning rewards and such in the game (you also get the benefit of an eternally patient group to practice with, and an independent judge - the game - to tell you where you're going right/wrong without ever having to feel embarassed by your mistakes).

Re:Note to your ass.

[Dorkmaster Flek]

The leaderboard issue, maybe. The problem is that we don't know how tied to the internal Xbox Live mechanisms this is. Would MS allow them to "freeze" the old leaderboards and keep a copy of them around to be viewed? If the only alternative is wiping them, people would freak.

As for the other stuff, uh, no. No, it cannot just be done in a patch. First of all, it would have to be a free forced upgrade. Adding new engine support for the keyboards, plus the insane amount of R&D that went into developing the pro guitar mode? That is not going to be free. If it's a paid patch, then it's technically a DLC addon, and that means it's optional. Now you have new DLC which supports the new features and doesn't work with the old "non-patched" version of the game, but it's still all the same game in the DLC marketplace? That is just insanely confusing. No, a new disc release is the only sensible way to handle that.