14 DAY TRIAL // It's clear for all those watching the videogame market that the two big music simulation oriented franchises, Rock Band and Guitar Hero, are doing very well, bringing big amounts of money to the developers and publishers. Activision, now married to Blizzard, has ownership of Guitar Hero but must be regretting driving off Harmonix, which now develops Rock Band together with MTV Games. To counter Rock Band, Activision is trying to expand the range of music games it offers by introducing spin offs. One of the rumored games, based on a trademark filling, was DJ Hero.
Now Activision has all but confirmed that the game is really in development. Talking to Joystiq, Brian Bright, who is the director of the Guitar Hero World Tour title, said that “Activision's doing a DJ Hero game, and I can't comment on what we're doing. But... we're working on the future and next gen. If I wasn't excited about it, I wouldn't be there”. Earlier rumors already suggested that the game would arrive in summer 2009 and that the concept was based on a peripheral, which would include a scratch platter and three buttons which would be used for sampling, along with a cross fader and a sound effects dial. The idea is for the game to do for club music what Guitar Hero has done for rock.
It seems that the development of the title is handled by FreeStyleGames, who have also created B-Boy. They were bought by Activision sometime in September and the company said that it would focus on localizing content related to Guitar Hero and would also work on new intellectual property.
There are some people who already feel like fools when launching into solos on fake plastic guitars. Will DJ-ing on plastic turntables feel worse or is this an interesting spin off for an established franchise?