In his latest column on IndustryGamers, EEDAR analyst Jesse Divnich suggests that the growth of peripheral-based music games may have already hit the ceiling. With sales in the genre down 30% from last year, he compares Rock Band and Guitar Hero to the granddaddy of rhythm-matching titles, Dance Dance Revolution. Divinich makes a compelling argument that sales of the games may already be in a state of irreversible decline.
There are a number of reasons for the games to be taking a sales hit, but they all come down to the amount of innovation being seen in each iteration being staggeringly small. Peripheral-based games need to be designed with the hardware of previous releases in mind, limiting the amount of design change that can be made. Competing developers pumping out lower-quality games also force publishers to try and cash in on their IP with more frequent releases and the reduction in development time restricts the implementation of new ideas as well.
None of this is to say that these games will not continue to be successful, but the expectation that the audience for Rock Band and Guitar Hero will keep expanding as it has over the last few years is probably unrealistic. The question is, what more can anyone really do?
Conrad Zimmerman is Destructoid's News Editor and home to the busiest mustache in the gaming press. An amateur historian and pop culture fanatic, Conrad possesses a nearly limitless wealth of videogame factoids and a passion for the power of games to teach, inspire and entertain. He enjoys reading, writing and turning things which should be fun into work.
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Contest:
9:20 AM on 07.21.2009
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Yes,
The future of such mediums will be in user created content, down the road Rock Band is going, where we upload tunes for others to use, and it should hopefully cost less to access.
As for the handheld angle, I still think Ouendan, Elite Beat Agents, DJ Max, Rhythm Tengoku, Taiko No Tatsujin etc are the cream of this side of the coin, than mainstream music bs games like Guitar Hero, as they usually have a better mix of music and fun gameplay. Even though Guitar Hero is on DS and PSP, the competition is tougher.
BAM.
Pretty much this. My girlfriend and I are huge Rockband/Guitar Hero fans but we haven't bought a new game in either series since the original RB and GH3. The problem was that the new games (especially RB2) came way too fast. We play RB's world tour mode all the time and we still haven't beat it. Once we do we may buy RB2 or GH:WT but it will be disc only. The only game with instruments we plan on buying is RB: Beatles. And thats just because we love the Beatles.
Music games are out
Fighting games are in
Imo every game is the same i got bored of it with the first rock band.Its like thps all over again the first three were good then they just get more and more things that doesnt change the gameplay the fundamentals stay so it becomes boring.
However Tony Hawk never had 6 games in one year so at least for me it happened faster. Im sick of music games thanks activision.
Now someone get rare to make a new killer instinct or ms to release the old ones on xbla. I dont want no perfect dark i want Killer Instinct.
Meanwhile, Beatmania fans still clamor for each new release and Pop'n Music fans remain quietly hoping that Konami will announce Adventure CS.
GH is ruining all the good RB did. They keep releasing more and more games, and don't allow me to import these songs into one game. When friends come over, we don't want to swap discs. We want to put one disc in, have a bunch of songs to choose from, and play them. This is easily solved by DLC and importing.
Viva Rock Band. Screw you, Activision. Pace yourself and your games will be better appreciated. No need to drive this genere into the ground the minute you get your greedy mitts on it.
I, too, found it a bit irksome, initially, that RB2 did away with the immediate visual feedback of your star count per song, but I feel that HMX pulled emphasis away from scoring points and more to a general party-game atmosphere with RB2. I learned to enjoy RB2 without my score being a factor--and that's great in my book :)