Rock Band 4 One-ups Guitar Hero Live: Supports Old Guitar Hero Gear

[Kinitawowi]

This whole discussion begs the question of why Rock Band and Guitar Hero never tried to pool resources to make a combined guitar. Work independently on the engines and interfaces and chart philosophies, sure, but with the axes (in particular) being interchangeable for so long, surely if they'd combined they could have saved some money on production and development costs - and as I understand it, part of the first slow death of rhythm gaming was precisely because of the increasingly prohibitive costs of controller production.

Maybe they could have come up with a core schematic together and then built their unique designs around that (the WoRtar would have been a perfect central design if anyone still cared). Of course, all that said, the whole genre still pretty much peaked with the original Gibson SG...

 

[Sight Unseen]

This whole discussion begs the question of why Rock Band and Guitar Hero never tried to pool resources to make a combined guitar. Work independently on the engines and interfaces and chart philosophies, sure, but with the axes (in particular) being interchangeable for so long, surely if they'd combined they could have saved some money on production and development costs - and as I understand it, part of the first slow death of rhythm gaming was precisely because of the increasingly prohibitive costs of controller production.

Maybe they could have come up with a core schematic together and then built their unique designs around that (the WoRtar would have been a perfect central design if anyone still cared). Of course, all that said, the whole genre still pretty much peaked with the original Gibson SG...

I think this comes down a lot to the history of Rock Band and Guitar Hero. Guitar Hero was originally developed by Harmonix with the help of RedOctane who acted as the publisher and manufacturer of the guitars. Harmonix was the dev for Guitar hero under contract for 3 titles: Guitar Hero, Guitar Hero 2, and Guitar Hero:Rocks the 80's. Activision bought RedOctane and the Guitar Hero IP after the release of Guitar Hero 2. Since Harmonix was still under contract, they made an Xbox 360 port of GH2 and Rock's the 80's while under Activision.

Activision LET THEM GO after this because they figured they only needed Red Octane and the IP, and they threw Neversoft on as the developer and essentially cast Harmonix aside. Harmonix, being the actual creative party behind the franchise then got picked up by MTV Games and Viacom and made Rock Band. Harmonix has since freed themselves and their IP from Viacom by buying themselves out and becoming essentially indie devs again.

So Harmonix was the brain child behind both Rock Band and Guitar Hero, but because Activision thought they weren't needed anymore they essentially got cast aside. I don't really expect them to work too closely with each other due to this previous relationship.

 

[Callate]

"Our position is really all about respect for our consumers and for the money that they have spent to get into the game space in the first place. They spend a fortune on games: on consoles, on hardware, and we're sensitive to that. We play those games too. We buy all the same stuff. A world where you need to have three different guitars and two drum sets and all this stuff is...we don't want to support that world," Sussman continued.

...Activision, d'you want to come back here and pick up this trail of ashes? 'Cuz you've been burned.