14 DAY TRIAL // Harmonix and MTV Games have announced that The Beatles Rock Band managed to sell about 357,000 units during the month of December, reaching a grand total of 1.18 million copies sold in the United States and about 1.7 million worldwide since it was released in September 2009. Harmonix has already outed entire The Beatles albums as downloadable content for the game and there are probably plans for more to come.
The good news for the Rock Band franchise is that The Beatles videogame managed to perform better than the most recent Guitar Hero title, which only sold about 1 million copies overall. Usually, the Guitar Hero series performed better at retail than Rock Band but the fifth iteration in the series has not succeeded in introducing enough innovation to offset the star power that The Beatles lent to Rock Band.
The bad news is that Rock Band 2, which was released in 2008 at about the same time as The Beatles title, sold 1.7 million units only in the United States in a similar time frame, which suggests that music titles are slowing down overall and not even the appearance of big bands can change that trend.
The NPD Group, which tracks both software and hardware sales for the United States market, has said that, overall, the revenue derived from music-oriented titles declined by almost 50% during 2009 when compared to 2008. The revenue brought in by videogames overall only went down by about 8%.
Despite the worrying trends, Harmonix and MTV Games have already announced that they are developing and will publish a Rock Band titles centered on songs from Green Day set to arrive in 2010. The two companies are also preparing the Rock Band Network, a new concept in music videogaming, which has no release date.