Activision's Guitar Hero Looking Down on Rock Band

There's a fierce battle going on the music game market, the one that started it all, Guitar Hero, has really caught the world by storm and broken through a market that wasn't even created and brought a new kind of fun you could have in front of your console by holding a guitar shaped controller and rocking out to your all time favorite tunes. It inspired wannabe guitar players and rockers all over the world and gave them a sensation of glory, some of them even landing Internet fame for setting record scores on the most hard rock tunes, like Dragonforce's “Through the fire and the flames”.

But the developer Harmonix thought that a music game shouldn't be constricted only to the guitar, other instruments could also be played, thus creating their own game, called Rock Band. It gave players the opportunity to play not only the guitar but also drums and vocals, each through their own dedicated peripherals. This game has enjoyed a lot of success and is now a serious contender to Activision's Guitar Hero, having launched a sequel a few days ago for the Xbox 360. Other console owners need to wait until October, for the PlayStation 3, or November, for the Wii and PS2.

Recently though, Activision boss Bobby Kotick made quite an interesting statement about the competition between the two games. “We’re outselling 6:1. When you think about the access we have to 30% of the world’s music at Universal, we have a unique advantage there. I would also say when you look at resources, you know, our next-nearest competitor has a couple of hundred people working on these projects, we have close to 2000 people just dedicated to the Guitar Hero note tracking, introduction of new hardware, introduction of new software, and so we just have a lot more in the way of resources available to us to continue to dominate the category.”

Quite the modest guy he is! It seems that with the money and resources from one of the biggest game companies backing the development, things sure run more smoothly than if you're a small independent developer. One thing's for sure, he doesn't worry about his product's supremacy but he definitely can't rest, because Rock Band is a good product and the guys at Harmonix have a few tricks up their sleeves.