Viacom Closes MTV Games 27
eldavojohn writes "The Escapist is reporting that the MTV Games division of Viacom is being closed. After selling off Harmonix for an alleged equivalent of a single Red Lobster Gift Card, it turns out that Viacom's division known as MTV Games has little left on its plate. There's some bickering over missed performance-based payments, and MTV Games failed to secure a publishing deal for all the Rock Band games in Europe — which appeared to be the final nail in the coffin for them."
Re:Music bubble. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Fad schmad. People still play these games. The market is saturated. Everybody who was gonna buy a set of Rock Band instruments has already done so.
But they can still make a killing selling replacement drum set pedals.
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They ought to just load them into containers and blow them out in some other country for a song, pun intended. Most of them are probably old controllers so they can be used to whet these potential markets' appetites for the new stuff. Another possibility is to work some deal to donate them and get some other company to buy them to do it (with the whole writeoff prepped already) in exchange for some cash.
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We still play RB1 and RB2, but we never upgraded past the RB1 instruments (wired). Probably will get the newer instruments at some point and get RB3, but there isn't enough new gameplay to make it worth shelling out close to the price of a console for a single game. And that's the biggest problem with the music games.
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Probably will get the newer instruments at some point and get RB3, but there isn't enough new gameplay to make it worth shelling out close to the price of a console for a single game.
Rock Band 3 there has amazing new gameplay. The keyboards alone are a great addition. The training is far more advanced, and with the right set up would very easily teach a person how to play a real instrument (which is not necessary if you just want to play a game). The Pro modes on all the instruments adds yet another level of difficulty. The ability to drop in and out of a song at any moment makes for a great party game. The ability to progress in the game even in no fail mode allows less skilled pla
And nothing of value was lost (Score:5, Insightful)
Did anybody really expect a publishing arm of The Shiny Things Network to be able to accomplish anything that requires effort? I mean they couldn't even get Harmonix' stuff published in Europe, and that was when it was actually popular (that bubble is over now).
This whole venture was little more then some suit saying "hey games are popular, lets get into that!" Once they did it, they realized that it's actually a tough, cutthroat industry.
Good riddence.
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My thoughts exactly. Sure, I bought a couple of GH games. They were amusing at the time, but the gimmick wore off, just like every game franchise that gets beaten worse than a dead horse (look at *shudders* CoD).
MTV had no business getting into gaming... actually, Viacom has no business existing at all. Please, please, please, stop.
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Xfire (Score:1)
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From wikipedia: "On August 2, 2010, Xfire was acquired by Titan Gaming"
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/02/exclusive-titan-gaming-takes-xfire-off-viacoms-hands/ [techcrunch.com]
My weekly gaming group still uses Xfire exclusively (the persistent group voice chat is very good).
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As an ex employee (Score:1)
This is no surprise. They did everything they could to run HMX into the ground before laying off 13% in December '09 to make their numbers look good. Since then it was a constant stream of people leaving.
Teen mom vs jersey shore (Score:1)
Too bad they never developed a mortal kombat style game.
I likely would have bought %subj% just to watch snookies spine get ripped out.
They did this to themselves (Score:2)
The reason Music games aren't doing well isn't that they aren't a genre people are interested in, simply that releasing the same game every 3 months and adding minor crap can make even the biggest fan of the genre completely jaded. Over saturation of any genre especially one that specific will eventually result in a total lack of interest in new products.
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This was somewhere that DLC could have been big. You get Rockband and as they license new content, sell it for 800MS points ($10) or 1200 points ($15) because you don't need to redo the game engine for each release. I think that would have solved some of the issues with saturation.