Harmonix Is Ending Rock Band DLC Releases After 16 Years, 2,800 Songs

Since launching in 2007, Harmonix's Rock Band has released over 2,800 DLC songs to keep its rhythm game fresh. Now, Harmonix has announced the last of the series' releases will arrive on January 25, "marking the end of a nearly 16-year era in music gaming history," reports Ars Technica. From the report: Previously purchased DLC songs will still be playable in Rock Band 4, Harmonix's Daniel Sussman writes in an announcement post. Rock Band 4 live services, including online play, will also continue as normal, after online game modes for earlier Rock Band games were finally shut down in late 2022. "Taking a longer look back, I see the Rock Band DLC catalog as a huge achievement in persistence and commitment," Sussman writes. "Over the years we've cleared, authored and released nearly 3,000 songs as DLC and well over 3,000 if you include all the game soundtracks. That's wild." [...]

While official support for Rock Band DLC is finally ending, the community behind Clone Hero just recently hit an official Version 1.0 release for their PC-based rhythm game that's compatible with many guitars, drums, keyboards, gamepads, and adapters used in Rock Band and other console rhythm games (microphones excluded). While that game doesn't come with anything like Rock Band's list of officially licensed song content, it's not hard to find a bevy of downloadable, fan-made custom Clone Hero tracks with a little bit of searching.

Since shortly after its acquisition by Epic in 2021, Harmonix has been working on "Fortnite Festival," the incredibly Rock Band-esque mini-game embedded in Epic's Fortnite "metaverse." Sussman writes that a "rotating selection" of free-to-play songs will continue to cycle through that game mode, and that support for Rock Band 4 instruments will be coming to Fortnite in the future as well (peripheral-maker PDP looks like it will be getting in on the Fortnite guitar act as well). As for the last few weeks of Rock Band DLC offerings, Sussman writes that Harmonix is planning "some tear jerkers that sum up our feelings about this moment."

epic strikes again

[jriding]

Epic and fortnight strike again at killing everything they buy and just making it a mini game inside fortnight.

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[thegarbz]

Epic and fortnight strike again at killing everything they buy and just making it a mini game inside fortnight.

I love shitting on Epic any chance I get, but this is not really on them. Honestly my biggest surprise in this post is that DLC is still being released. The most recent version of Rock Band is a hair short of a decade old. You can count on one hand the number of games in history which have been supported with additional content for that length of time.

And no, the new Doom level released a few weeks ago doesn't count.

GaaS?

[GoJays]

I wonder if they plan to go the Rocksmith route? Rocksmith had a pretty big library of songs (over a 1000 I think), and only stopped releasing DLC packs a couple years ago. They then released a "new" game that was based on a monthly subscription. I noped out of that pretty quick.... sorry, but not renting the songs at a cost of $20/month.

and there's such a thing as bad publicity also

[pereOlthwaite]

They tried to evolve, but the punters didn't seem to much care for the more advanced aspects of RockBand III, so they re-dumbed everything and became irrelevant. Ubisoft's not-quite-so-poorly-implemented Rocksmith appears to have stalled as well. Presumably this too is on account of some supposed failing in the audience.

Rocksmith

[TechyImmigrant]

Why is there not a Slahdot story about the shitshow that Rocksmith has become?
I don't care about a game with plastic fake instruments.

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[Petersko]

Perhaps because you haven't submitted one?

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[TechyImmigrant]

Perhaps because you haven't submitted one?

True. It's old news.

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[Can'tNot]

Rockband has the plastic instruments. Rocksmith uses a real guitar. Different games, different developers. I don't know about this shitshow story or which game it refers too.

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[TechyImmigrant]

Rocksmith 2014 (the one with real instruments was good). It had real musicians doing to notation for a wide variety of music and you could get extra tunes as DLC.

Rocksmith+ came about, the music you paid for in Rocksmith 2014 would not work in it. They fired the musicians and relied on some user-generated notating that never happened. So it has no music you want to play. It because a subscription thing also. They ruined Rocksmith.

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[Can'tNot]

Oh, I see. No wonder they never did any more games. That's a disappointment.

we stopped because of their policies

[argStyopa]

With 4 kids we used to have a great time with rock band, wearing out 3 guitars and 2 drum kits...but then discovered they'd mysteriously remotely deleted some Police songs we'd paid for as dlc with nary a company or apology. We did get Xbox credits for the value, Iirc, but that bullshit sort of soured us generally.

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[bobzieruncle]

Licensing music. That's what made the DLC shittier regardless of whatever Rock Band was also doing. \_()_/

Game killed itself.

[rykin]

So, I still have all of the instruments from the Xbox 360. I wanted to use them on my new Xbox One, but due to the restrictions on the system, you could only use the old instruments if you bought their special Rock Band Only controller adapter. However, they stop producing this adapter after a short time, and to purchase it 2nd hand costs more than $400. They they even stopped making the new instruments, so that was also bloody expensive.

A few years ago, my friends were really interested in playing Rock Ba

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[SuiteSisterMary]

Same. I still have my Ion Drum rocker, but it won't work on the One or X/S. Tragic.