14 DAY TRIAL // The music game genre is a very interesting one, giving fans the chance to play their favorite songs at home and envision themselves on the stages of the biggest concert halls in the world. One of the titles that truly revolutionized this genre was, without a doubt, Rock Band, developed by Harmonix and published by MTV.
The title brought new instruments and a lot of innovations to the music game genre, which was, until then, dominated by Activision's Guitar Hero. It offered the possibility to play the drums and vocals, besides the already classic guitar, and introduced an innovative system of DLC (Downloadable Content) packs, which launched a few tracks every week, thus keeping the public interested in the game.
Recently, Harmonix talked about the actual content of its DLC track packs, and went on to say that the new strategy in forming them would be to introduce more global bands, which didn't necessarily have fans in the United States. Also, in the territories where it was possible, the developer would implement songs of local bands, as a bigger incentive for the customers. Here's what Dan Teasdale, a Harmonix executive, had to say about the new direction of the DLC packs.
"I think there are bands that are big enough to survive, like Jet, Silverchair, that kind of stuff. I think is a no-brainer to put on the platform because they're known bands. I think it's more stuff like Regurgitator where nobody knows outside of Australia. At the same time they fit it perfectly. That's one of the cool things about the music store, it's less risk for us than putting it on the disc so we can takes chances with Australian content, or unearthed content, kind of the same way we did Jimmy Buffet in the US. That was our first test of going a little outside what we'd usually do, and it went really well, so I think you'll see more stuff like that."
A really great idea, as a lot of customers would like to play the songs of their favorite bands, even if the groups aren't very well known, or haven't broken out into the mainstream audience. If Harmonix implements this new strategy then a lot of customers are going to be interested in buying these songs.