Rock Band 3 Officially Announced For Holiday 2010 76
An anonymous reader writes "Philippe Dauman, Viacom CEO and President, announced today that Harmonix is currently working on the next Rock Band game, Rock Band 3, due for release Holiday 2010. 'The company is pursuing the game in spite of an industry-weakening decline in the once-booming genre of peripheral-equipped music games. Although the franchise has generated over $1 billion to date, the category in general saw sales contract by as much as half throughout 2009. MTV Games parent Viacom also saw Rock Band declines drag on its balance sheet in its last fiscal quarter, and expressed a need to refocus away from pricey peripherals in favor of software. It also said that due to royalties it would need to be more "selective" about track listings, and that it needs more support from the music industry in that department.'"
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We're Americans, here. We only get one holiday [wikipedia.org], and it only happens at one predetermined point of the year [wikipedia.org]. You insensitive clod.
Re:Which holiday? (Score:4, Insightful)
...the franchise has generated over $1 billion to date...
It also said that due to royalties it would need to be more "selective" about track listings, and that it needs more support from the music industry in that department.
We ain't making enough cash off this donkey. Find me a cheaper one.
There. TTFY.
Why can't a company look at a product and simply say "You know, we had a good idea and we did it well." Why do they always have to look at how they can do the same idea again and try to fuck someone over harder to make the same money? It's the IDEA that's the money maker, not screwing over some part of the liabilities sheet. Seriously. Just once?
Re:Which holiday? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the IDEA that's the money maker, not screwing over some part of the liabilities sheet.
That's BS. The original idea itself counts for very little; "ideas are like assholes: everyone has one". It's how you turn an idea into reality that counts, and how you get the money in from people in return for their little bit of that reality which counts, and yes, how you control liabilities.
The original idea itself can be patented (Score:2)
The original idea itself counts for very little
Tell that to Roxor Games, whom Konami sued into the ground for making In the Groove. Konami managed to patent in the United States several methods essential to music games, and Activision's Guitar Hero products use the Guitar Freaks and DrumMania patents under license from Konami.
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...the franchise has generated over $1 billion to date... It also said that due to royalties it would need to be more "selective" about track listings, and that it needs more support from the music industry in that department.
We ain't making enough cash off this donkey. Find me a cheaper one. There. TTFY.
I think the question is less about "how do we ring them dry?", more "how can we keep this profitable so we can continue?". The licensed songs give a portion of revenue (by percentage) to the artist, and another portion of the sales to MS or Sony (standard DLC listing cost). So, costs are fixed (manpower) and demand for each song is declining (fewer people are playing, and there's a lot more songs than any one person will reasonably buy, over 1000), that means revenues will need to increase somewhere. One
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MORE COWBELL!!!
"Holiday"? (Score:5, Funny)
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Meh. (Score:2)
It's between the propth and hexth of Octember (inclusive). I thought everyone knew that?
And here [slashdot.org] was me complaining about them using seasons...
They Must Mean Mithras' Birthday. Right...? (Score:2)
It is, of course, a product of that politically-correct shadow-war on Christmas, escalated to the next level, which is that of Incomprehensibility.
Re:"Holiday"? (Score:4, Funny)
Lousy Smarch.
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Holiday is related to Black Friday (Score:3, Interesting)
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Thanksgiving in USA != Thanksgiving elsewhere (Score:2)
The holiday season (in general) means the time between Thanksgiving and New Years Day, inclusive
That's the same Holiday season I was referring to; my reckoning of Holiday for game releases is the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. It's just that Thanksgiving occurs a month and a half earlier in (say) Canada; is the "holiday season" considered twice as long there?
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I thought everything was twice as long in Canadia.
Thank you.
Freedom From Religion Foundation (Score:2)
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I think you mean "African-American Friday".
Meh (Score:3)
Re:Meh (Score:5, Interesting)
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See, that's really smart. Unfortunately, it's a lot harder than tapping buttons for most people.
They need to let you plug your own guitar into the game as a controller. That's a game I'd play.
When consoles really got high-tech, I thought for sure we'd see lots of music-training games. Unfortunately, they didn't really show up in the numbers and variety I'd hoped.
Guitar Rising (Score:2)
They need to let you plug your own guitar into the game as a controller. That's a game I'd play.
You might be interested in Guitar Rising [guitarrising.com].
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There have been others [guitarrising.com] promising [littlebigstar.net] the same thing [wired.com], but so far nobody has delivered anything close to how awesome this could be.
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I'll throw this one [jamorigin.com] on the pile too. Looks sweet. Too sweet. Smells like vaporware.
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WOW Amazing!! That will change everything...
Thanks for the link!
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It looks really interesting, though their site has mystery meat navigation and no info on the game that I can find. I sure hope their game-developer skills are superior to their web-developer skills...
Doesn't matter (Score:2)
If the new Power Gig is as good as it appears to be (and can get enough good guitar songs) it will blow away Rock Band and Guitar Hero :)
They Killed the thing for good. (Score:1)
Not exactly compatible peripherals among games, crappy and buggy implementations, absurd prices and bad playlists pretty much killed the genre. It's been downhill since after guitar hero 3/rock band 1.
After guitar hero 3, new releases seems to be using the same (and bad) engine. It epicly fail to process the buttons and frets on the PS2, and drops framerate noticeably all the time on the wii. They chose impossible-to-accomplish-on-those-platform graphics over gameplay.
All that and guitar hero aerosmith.
By t
DJ Hero and Band Hero (Score:2)
By the way, DJ Hero? WTF?
Real-time playback of a mash-up, which is supposed to be a more accurate simultation of real DJing than Konami's Beatmania.
And wtf is Band Hero?
Guitar Hero 5 with a set list from more "pop" genres.
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DJ Hero isn't THAT BAD. It's actually a fresh idea for a change. My mistake was trusting the GH franchise just that one more time after getting burned by the utter crappiness that was GHIII and Aerosmith.
DJ Hero hit with a bunch of fanfare, a couple DLC packs came out, and now they are talking about DJ Hero II while support for the original dropped off to nothing. Activision/Neversoft's idea of churning out several releases a year with mediocre after-support are killing the genre by flooding the market w
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Not exactly compatible peripherals among games
I was under the impression that most peripherals from the same platform would work across both the Guitar Hero series and the Rock Band series. At the very least, my USB guitar controller from the PC version seems to work fine with all the Xbox 360 music games I've tried, and the compatibility matrix on Rockband.com suggests that most drum sets are also compatible.
That said, Activision took a huge crap all over the franchise, starting with GH3. The engine, as you explained, is utter garbage. On my Crysis
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Well, if you wait a few months you can get the disk much cheaper. I can't stand spending $2 per song when I can get like 80 songs for like $30. I guess I'm just not that concerned with how awesome the music is. I don't actually listen to a lot of what they offer anyway. I just like playing along to whatever song. I even enjoy playing songs by bands I hate if they are fun to pla
Oh God No (Score:1)
It also said that due to royalties it would need to be more "selective" about track listings,...
This sounds like "let's include more stuff like "Visions" and "I'll get By" where the artist is happy we included them in our game, not like those big rock stars with their big egos and good music and wanting a decent royalty, a pox on them!"
Are bands/labels dumb? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would ANYONE charge to be in Rock Band? If you want a sure way to boost your sales, get yourself featured in Rock Band. Thousands of people discovering or re-discovering your music is a pretty fucking obvious way to scare up some sales. Hell, for any game where music is featured a band is only screwing themselves by putting up barriers for being selected. If I had a band, I would murder my way into getting put on a GTA music station. Even for big name stars, reminding hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people that you still rock isn't going to hurt. It is even more important if you are an older band whose original followers are in the process getting jammed into nursing homes. You should be fighting over the privilege to introduce yourself to the younger generations via Rock Band.
The music industry has its head jammed so firmly up their ass that is a minor miracle and a testament to monopoly power that they continue to exist each year.
Rock Band Network launched... (Score:4, Informative)
When they say that they're going to be more "selective" with the music they pick up, I'm guessing that's the direction they'll go in. It doesn't necessarily mean they'll be using worse bands or less good music - it more likely means that you'll be seeing less of Metallica in favor of more Mastodon, things along that line. And I wouldn't have a huge issue with that.
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And along that point, it's worth reminding people that the Rock Band Network just launched, making it even easier for those bands to get on there. The downside being that you'll have to rely on community rating to show up among the crowd of other bands on there - there were a 100 tracks released on launch of the
And I'd like to point out that the RBN is for XBox, less than 1/3 of the user base, with no guarantee that any particular song will show up in the Sony and Nintendo stores after a minimum of a month. No, RBN is a slap in the face to 2/3 of the RB players, a big negative in my books.
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As much as I would like to argue with you, the AC is right.
Harmonix definitely has played favoritism among the consoles with a heavy bias towards the 360. A couple examples are the delay in the RB2 release for the PS3 and Wii, the exclusivity of "All you need is Love", the even more delayed RB2 patch everyone waited over a year for, and now RBN.
Unfortunately lack of RBN support is the fault of Sony and Nintendo. And the saddest part now is that neither of these "other two" consoles will ever have parity w
Only 1/3? (Score:2)
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What about the potential install base for people like me who have the Wii and that feature would would sway them into buying Rock Band? I've stuck with Guitar Hero since Harmonix/EA seems intent on flipping the bird to Wii owners (later releases, removed features, etc).
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the band may be all for it, but the copyright holder of the recording and also the actual composer of the song/melody are the ones who pull the strings here... a band may not have any rights at all to their classic performances... albums/singles created as work for hire and songs they didn't write either...
Novelty has worn off... (Score:1)
Contracting Sales (Score:4, Interesting)
...the once-booming genre of peripheral-equipped music games. Although the franchise has generated over $1 billion to date, the category in general saw sales contract by as much as half throughout 2009
Maybe its because the same peripherals could be used from Rock Band with Rock Band 2? The upfront cost of the game initially is expensive but once you have the guitars, microphone, and drum set the cost is significantly cheaper to move to a new edition and that's where the sales start to contract. The same goes for the Guitar Hero series also.
Personally, I think the genre has entered its maturity when it comes to growth and needs some drastic change or needs to evolve into something different. One solution might be introducing new peripherals but they need more advanced peripherals because at this point you need to justify paying for another 15 pounds of plastic.
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One solution might be introducing new peripherals but they need more advanced peripherals because at this point you need to justify paying for another 15 pounds of plastic.
The justification is breakage. The plastic drums are a joke and few last beyond a year of usage. The plastic guitars are almost as bad. However, I agree completely that they need to produce more advanced peripherals. While you can use a "real" electronic drum kit via a midi interface, the guitar is still a toy without strings.
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I cannot find reference to it anywhere else. If true, it could make it worth looking at.
well, that was uplifting. (Score:4, Funny)
That's got to be the most disheartening game release article I've ever read. "Our parent company think we're hemorrhaging money and we can't afford to put cool songs in the game because record labels are dumb, but uhhhh, yeah, we're gonna go ahead and do another game." I mean, what's the WoW2 release gonna look like?
"We at Blizzard are proud to announce that World of Warcraft 2 will be in stores on.....ahhh fuck it. Who are we kidding? We're just ripping money off of fat, friendless losers and people with OCD. Blah, blah, blah, enhanced 3d vectors and more elf chicks for creepy douchebags to write fanfic over. Have you read our support forums? Seriously? We're supposed to feel good about creating this shit for these people? Whoopee, we're bumping up the level caps so more 12 year olds can live in front of a monitor drinking mountain dew for hours on end instead of going outside. Huzzah!
Dude, Is this all there is to life? I mean, fuck, man, I'm gonna turn 40 soon and this is all I do? Write bullshit copy for gamer rags. I was gonna do something with my life, I was gonna be something. Screw it man, I'm gonna go drink alone......
Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. is an American video game developer and publisher founded in February 1991, and has published such hits as Starcraft and Diablo.
More support from the music industry? (Score:2)
If they want a winner... (Score:1)
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Rock Band Network (Score:1, Troll)
make it so I can import music I already own
What did you mean by this? If you own copyright in the composition and the recording, you can spend $1,000 for the XNA devkit (dual core PC + Windows OS + Xbox 360 + Creators Club + Live Gold) and put the songs on Rock Band Network. If you merely own a copy, it probably isn't split-track, so how would the game know what frequencies to play when you miss a note?
Can't run GarageBand and RBN on same OS (Score:2)
You mean with the PC I already own (includes Windows)
My PC is too old for XNA Game Studio. Other people might own a Mac, especially people who bought a Mac for GarageBand.
the XBOX I already play with a Gold Live account.
Rock Band Network authoring tools are not available for the Wii or PLAYSTATION 3 version of Rock Band.
Net cost for most people who already game
I'll grant for purposes of this discussion that more people who play Rock Band have a recent Windows PC than have a Mac, a Linux PC, or an older Windows PC. But what sales figures are you using to back up your claim that "most people who already" play Rock Band have the Xbox 360 version?
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I think having to buy the songs again is the whole point for them.
Weak offering in 2009 (Score:3, Interesting)
So, what happened in 2009?
Rock Band 2 was released in 2008, and had some time to die down before 2009. Same for Guitar Hero World tour.
Harmonix released Beatles Rock Band. Were they expecting that to do as well as Rock Band 2? The only logic I can see to Beatles Rock Band is that maybe they are hoping that Beatles fans are like Star Trek fans; there are some compulsive enough to pay any price for anything branded with their favorite franchise. (Before you get angry, The Beatles could have made a great series of track packs, but you cannot expect one band to carry half the industry).
I own Guitar Hero 5. It's alright, but most reviews complained about a weak song list, and Guitar Hero Van Halen didn't exactly bring people to stores.
So, is it possible that the decline was due to a weak offering in 2009? These companies are shooting themselves in the foot by providing an even weaker offering in 2010.
Simon (Score:1)
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It's basically how that experiences meshes up with the fact that the gems are synched to the actual notes in the song, for the most part.
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For myself and friends, it's like Alcohol fueled Karaoke night, plus score keeping. How is there not appeal there?
tl, dr: Never play Rock Band alone, sober, or on a difficulty above "Medium".
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It's a party game. A fun thing to break out when you've got family or friends over for a visit and want to do something sociable. More fun than Monopoly, and depending on how competitive your family is, less argument inducing. But unless you're the kind of person who enjoys games like Simon, you're not going to have fun playing it by yourself. (And, yes, there are people who like games like Simon believe it or not).
This is actually why I think both Rock Band and Guitar Hero have been seeing reduced sale
How about cheaper software!?! (Score:2)
Is it any wonder that the booming economy is in $10 iPhone games when we have a recession where people don't want to spend loads of money on something that just might suck?!?
The song/peripheral games market is saturated and people that play these games with groups of people don't need more than what they already have.