Its obvious that a lot of you people making comments know nothing about the games. Activision, not Harmonix, flooded the market with new games. They are also the one continually coming out with new, slightly different controllers. They also make sure your downloaded songs DON"T work with new games. Harmonix IS innovating and bringing new things to the genre. Pro modes, which can actually teach you to play real music. I have been using the same rock band 2 drums for several years. I did upgrade them with cymbals (cost $30). The songs I downloaded for rock band one, 3 or 4 years ago work with rock band 3. Whoever buys Harmonix will be getting a top-notch developer. They will succeed with whatever they try next.
Buying Rock Band Developer Harmonix Like Catching a Falling Knife, Says EA
- Thread starter Logan Westbrook
- Start date
gsf1200 said:
Basically what this guy says. Harmonix is easily my favourite dev studio and while they aren't perfect and neither is Rock Band 3, they are one of the best game studios around in terms of trying to listen to their fanbase and genuinely make new and fun experiences and not just merely milk a franchise until it dies.
I just reallly realllly realllyy hope that Activision is also not interested in HMX because if Acti picks up HMX, I foresee HMX either getting immediately dissolved/forced to work on guitar hero, or having to meet deadlines to put out 3 mediocre games a year and less DLC. Either is very bad in my opinion
The only possible (not likely) positive of having Acti pick up HMX would be if they merged GH and RB into one entity and somehow managed to merge the music catalogues into one super epic catalog. The problem with this is that RB and GH have different instruments and modes, gameplay features (unison bonuses vs band moments, extended sustains vs trills/tremolo picking) that would somehow need to be combined to be compatible with one game.
Why do I keep having to bring this up? The early numbers used for the "TERRIBLE TERRIBLE SALES" were European Union sales for the PS3 in week one, and then followed up with the claim that the game was selling terribly. To date:Logan Westbrook said:
http://gamrreview.vgchartz.com/sales/29394/rock-band-3/
http://gamrreview.vgchartz.com/sales/29395/rock-band-3/
http://gamrreview.vgchartz.com/sales/29396/rock-band-3/
116,138 ps3
212,769 360
91,937 Wii
420,000 total sales to date, which is roughly half of the sales to this point of Rock Band 2 when it first came out.
That is by no means 'not selling particularly well'. They're also going to have two more bursts of sales with the holiday season, and when the Squier Strat comes out.
All this bad press the gaming media has been pushing around about RB3's sales is fulfilling their own created prophecy.
Even though rock band 3 may be a great game... the launch was just plain weird.Scizophrenic Llama said:
The main selling point was supposed to be the pro controllers, and they didn't realease those until much later, the madcatz pro guitar having just launched recently, and the fender pro guitar launching in march?
My guess is most people are/were expecting the pro controllers to buy the game. But most of them will lose interest over time about them. I think it was a huge risk by harmonix and not sure if it was worth it. I bet nobody will give a damn about the fender proguitar by march.
AC10 said:
True, cheaper games will make this a lot better in the long run. Matter of fact, I highly doubt that they would need to make a new game peripheral for quite some time. But I think they would have to really diversify the market.Amnestic said:
I'm sure not many people have heard of Drummania or Guitar Freaks, which I believe to be a very successful series (even if it's mainly Japanese music). Problem is, licensing kills all of the deals. I would love it if there were more international music that was cheaper or music from various sources.
When they started looking into specific music bands, I felt that was truly a step in the wrong direction on all fronts.
In track lists.Onyx Oblivion said:
It has not suffered in song selection.
Believe me as a frequent player of both series, gameplay-wise Guitar Hero is better than Rock Band (I could go into why, but let's just say "design choices" and leave it at that").
OT: It's a damn shame, Harmonix is excellent at what they do, even if what they do is make games in a genre that's already full of similar games.
But, hey... can't you direct them in another genre? Or have them make 80 more Dance Central Games?
I wouldn't say it's that risky, EA.
I think Harmonix has more to offer, somebody just has to give them a chance. There's still plenty of market out there for music games, just not so much be the big peripherals that go with it.
Harmonix has always been great at experimenting. Before they made Guitar Hero (and later, Rock Band), they had FreQuency and Amplitude, as well as EyeToy: Antigrav (that one might be a lot more fun with Kinect . . . if Sony doesn't hold a license on it). I hope they are bought, because they can still make great stuff. They just been forced into a cycle of sequels and spin-offs for Rock Band.
Harmonix has always been great at experimenting. Before they made Guitar Hero (and later, Rock Band), they had FreQuency and Amplitude, as well as EyeToy: Antigrav (that one might be a lot more fun with Kinect . . . if Sony doesn't hold a license on it). I hope they are bought, because they can still make great stuff. They just been forced into a cycle of sequels and spin-offs for Rock Band.
This article is so redundant. Interesting how it ignores the fact he also said that HMX are one of the great developers of all time and that he thinks the music game genre will recover. That falling knife quote was taken out of context. It'd be fine if this had been reported before Kotaku cleared it up, but this was posted nearly half a day later >.<
Poketom said:
as someone who doesn't have much interest in these music titles, I can barely tell the difference between each guitar band and rock hero. but between those, the other titles and things like DJ hero, it just seems a long series of putting out exactly the same game with very slight changes.lotr rocks 0 said:
What other game could get away with putting out the same gameplay, with the same story and just changing the soundtrack? (other then sports titles, which is another game type that I think release too many titles)
Two iterations in a year sounds too much to me anyway, how can they possibly change much when working on those timeframes?
But then I'm not the chump that paid full price for the same game twice, so maybe it's just something I wouldn't understand.
This sound like one amazing idea, actually. Just picture it, you'd get to pick between all sort of instruments to play. And when you fail playing your part in the song, then everything fails epically. Though I wonder how they could make a handy gigantic plastic cello...HankMan said:
Umm, lets see. Sports games, racing games, rpg's (particularly turn based), fps's, real time strategy games. These games all typically have virtually identical or only slightly tweaked gameplay mechanics with every iteration. Multiplayer focused FPS's (you know who I'm talking about) in particular are just basically the same game with 10 new maps since the stories are just as bad or worse than any forgettable music game story. With music games, particularly Rock Band, the music IS the story, so changing that does make every game unique, and if you don't like music, you shouldn't be playing music games.Flying Dagger said:
Also, with HMX's music game, you really get potentially dozens of games worth of content in one disk since you can import RB1 RB2 RB:Lego RB:ACDC RB:Green Day, all the track packs, and over 2000 DLC and RBNsongs. No game EVER has had even close to this amount of title support over a three year period, and RB3 was completely redesigned from the ground up and is not at all similar to its predecessor in any aspect other than the most basic gameplay. The menus are completely new and way more user friendly, there's a new intrument and pro modes/harmonies for every instrument, new trainers and career systems and tons of other new things. It's far from perfect, but it's ANYTHING BUT stagnant and un-innovative.
Rock Band 3 is in my opinion, the most innovative sequel of any game franchise of this decade, it just changed so many of its core features.
On the guitar hero side though, I agree with you completely. GH:WOR was basically GH5 with a silly story and a weird setlist, and could easily have just been DLC. Rock Band 3 though has enough new things to be well worth buying a new disk for, espescially since Rock Band 2 is now over two years old and is starting to show its age with slower load times and downloads due ot the staggeringly large catalog.