Harmonix Will Bring Innovation to Rock Band

Harmonix has been very successful lately with its Dance Central series, which has just received its second Kinect motion tracking powered installment, but the developer says that it plans to return to Rock Band, it's main franchise, with renewed vigor.

Speaking to Giant Bomb Alex Rigopulos, who is the Chief Executive Officer working at Harmonix, has stated, “In the short term, we’re basically continuing to attend to that business as we have been. In the longer term, looking into next year, we’re actually considering fairly fundamental creative reinterpretation of what the Rock Band business is. We’re committed to the franchise, but when I think that when we do things with it in the future, it’s going to be a pretty dramatic departure from what we’ve done before.”

Eran Egozy, who is the CTO and one of the co-founders at the developer, added, “All I’ll say for now is that it isn’t what you think. You might assume we’re going to add saxophone or something along those lines, but no, the kind of direction we’re planning on taking Rock Band, the kind of innovation we have in mind, is taking it in a different direction.”

The two executives believe that the gaming world is now very different from what existed in 2007, when Rock Band first broke through, and that they need to adapt their products to new expectations.

DLC for Rock Band 3 is still being launched on the PlayStation Network from Sony and on the Xbox Live Arcade from Microsoft.

The music simulation genre was one of the big trends of the last few years, with Rock Band selling a lot of Rock Band titles while Activision competed with its Guitar Hero series.

Both those franchises are now on hiatus and the music game genre these days is represented by smaller and simpler titles like the Just Dance series from Ubisoft.