14 DAY TRIAL // September 1 is just around the corner and will bring with it the release of Guitar Hero 5, the Activision-made music title set to revolutionize the genre again. Only days latter, on September 9, Harmonix and MTV Games should offer gamers a chance to pick up The Beatles Rock Band. The battle between the two videogames will be one of the headlines of the Christmas shopping season and most people believe that the match up is pretty much even.
Enter Jessie Divnich, an analyst for EEDAR. He believes, according to Bloomberg, that, at the end of the season, we will be seeing Guitar Hero 5 outsell The Beatles Rock Band by more than a 2 to 1 ratio.
In actual sales numbers, he thinks that Guitar Hero 5 will move more than 4 million copies, while The Beatles offering from Harmonix is only set to get around 1.7 million gamers to its product.
Divnich has justified his analysis by saying that “I believe that at the end of the day, it comes down to marketing muscle, and Activision has proven in numerous showdowns that they can out advertise and out promote their competitor. If Activision relaxes on the marketing spend, while MTV Games kicks it up a notch, there's certainly a chance that I could be wrong.”
Apparently, the spin off DJ Hero might get a big marketing push that could end up hurting the sales of Guitar Hero 5, which is actually the bigger release.
Overall, Divnich believes that the music game genre, which, in a few years, has risen from relative obscurity to prominence, has peaked and that beyond the two new high profile releases, both Harmonix and Activision will have problems in attracting more customers and will need to focus on selling more content to the same people.