14 DAY TRIAL // Once upon a time, only a couple of years ago, one of the big rivalries of the year was the battle between music simulation Rock Band and Guitar Hero, the dueling franchises from Electronic Arts and Harmonix and Activision Blizzard.
Nowadays the music game scene is much smaller, but the developers working at Harmonix, now owned by an investment fund, are saying that Rock Band is in no way dead and that news about a new release could arrive next year.
Speaking to VG247, John Drake, who is an executive at Harmonix, has said, “I think we spent a lot of time and had a lot of passion going into that project. The team was a big team and they worked really hard for a long time. We thought that Rock Band Pro was one of the most innovative and huge things that a company has done with a videogame expansion in years.”
Later he added, more bluntly, “We’re supporting our community, we’re not going away: Rock Band’s not dead. We’re not making another retail release this year, but we’re probably the most aggressive company, I’d say, in videogames about supporting our community with digital content.”
The executive has acknowledged that the market is not ready for more full releases of Rock Band and conceded that Rock Band 3 has not performed as well as expected from a commercial stand point, but he says that DLC is still doing well.
There are more than 3,000 songs offered for download for the series and Harmonix says that it has managed to sell more than 100 million pieces of downloadable content.
Recently, executives at Activision Blizzard have also reported that Guitar Hero might be revived one day, although no concrete plans were announced.
Harmonix is set to launch the Kinect powered Dance Central 2 in late October.