Rock Band Network on the Nintendo Wii Shuts Down

The Rock Band Network, Harmonix' one stop destination for those that want new tracks for their Rock Band music games, will see its Wii channel be shut down this week.

The Rock Band music games have been quite a hit, largely due to the great support development studio Harmonix has offered, including the Rock Band Network.

Here, owners of titles starting from Rock Band 2 can download new tracks that can then be played in the game, besides the traditional DLC offered by Harmonix.

While the service was a huge hit on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles, it failed to generate a loyal audience on the Nintendo Wii.

As such, Harmonix has just announced that it will be shutting down the Wii Rock Band Network this week.

According to community manager Aaron Trites, the limited demand for content and the Wii's small user base played a key role in this decision.

"With the smaller online install base, limited demand for releases so far and the significant amount of work it takes for our producers and audio team to convert and process those additional tracks we're no longer able to continue submitting [Rock Band Network] content to the Wii," said Trites.

One more set of tracks will be released this week, but after that, owners of Rock Band 2 or 3 on the Wii are only going to access traditional DLC content on their platform.

The Rock Band Network offered the chance for composers and groups to get their tracks into Rock Band games without having to wait for Harmonix to process their songs, and expand the music catalog of the titles.

Harmonix hasn't been going through the best of times recently, as it was recently sold for an extremely low price by Viacom, even if it proved that it can do more than Rock Band after releasing Dance Central for Microsoft's new Kinect device.

As you can imagine, the shut down of the Rock Band Network on the Wii might have been an effect of this turmoil.