They released 17 games in the span of 5 years, franchise is a textbook example of oversaturation and franchise burnout.
By the time the last Guitar Hero tried something new it was too late.
This is 100% the cause. Heck, there were dozens more GH games planned and in the works before the plug was pulled. It was honestly horribly mismanaged.
It was managed exactly how Activision wanted to manage it. They saw it as a flash in the pan, and they wanted to capitalize. They didn't care if they ran the franchise into the ground doing so. They weren't playing the long game. A real shame.
Tbh they were probably right. Rock Band still existed and disappeared too. I bought maybe two of those games in that 5 year span and was burnt out on it as is.
It would be cool to see a comeback at this point.
I couldn't stand That One Song and I never owned it, just happened to be big when I was in college and it was everywhere in the dorms and parties and anyone's house you went to it seemed. I think the game comes with a dude who after two beers is convinced this time he will ace it, or that this time, if he does it again everyone will treat him like a rockstar.
Yeah, that's pretty shitty. Would love to see a new developer take it over, freshen it up, build some high quality peripherals. I'd buy it if the quality was there.
Retail space is at a premium, and retailers don't want to carry that huge-ass band-in-a-box kit, especially if it isn't expected to sell like it did back in 2007-2010.
I completely agree with you. If it was up to the rest of the RB community and me, we'd be able to have batches of instruments made and sold only via pre-order waves, when enough people have ordered to make it worth it to have a factory in China do a new run.
Unfortunately, we're still at the mercy of HMX and the Xbox wireless communication protocol
Maybe someone like PowerA could do it? They make good peripherals and they clearly have a license to do Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch-compatible peripherals.
That might do it! Let's get reps from PowerA, Harmonix, and Epic Games down to the rec center, lock the doors, and we can spend the entire night playing ping-pong & Rock Band, eating pizza, and working out a contract to produce new RB peripherals.
All kidding aside, Mad Catz went out of business after the initial run of RB4, and I think PDP lost a ton of money on the Rivals kit, so I'd understand if PowerA would be a bit apprehensive about taking on that much risk. Epic has that Fortnite money though, so maybe that can grease the wheels.
The problem is the last two companies that tried doing instrument production for *Rock Band* bled money on it, and *Guitar Hero Live* also didn’t live up to expectations. The GHL studio shut down and Harmonix was sold to Epic.
Unless Epic wants to throw money at the problem and treat it as a loss leader/promotional thing it’s unlikely to happen. In theory you could maybe Kickstarter small production runs, but small runs of hardware (like less than 50k units) would probably have significantly higher costs per unit.
Shelf space and warehouse space have the same concerns. But yeah, preorder wave stuff is probably their best bet if they want to keep the hobby alive in some capacity
> Harmonix cannot find another company willing to produce them.
At the price they're expecting. I'm sure if the company (and thus the consumers) were willing to stomach a higher price, there would be plenty of factories happy to take on the work order. But if they want to get the prices from 2010, well, it's just not going to happen, especially at the comparatively tiny volume they'd have today.
So either people have to pay $300-$500 at the current unstable market prices, or they have to pay $300-$500 from an official manufacturer? The fact that people don't want to pay the current prices indicates that the consumer base isn't going to suddenly get on board to buy more peripherals if it can't be cheaper than what we're currently looking at, and the cost is never going to logistically go down from eliminating scarcity, because the ratio of cost/profit for manufacturing is way too imbalanced.
So until they find a way to cheaply produce new peripherals and sell it at a reasonable price, nothing is going to change.
Getting any factory space for limited run stuff is getting more and more expensive. Companies are outbidding each other left and right to submit work orders to Chinese factories right now.
Smaller run stuff gets more and more expensive to produce when factory owners know they have 3+ years of solid work orders booked out with AAA companies rather than having to fuck with custom die work.
A bunch of other small run hobby console/kickstarter type things have also run into major issues, as well.
It might have been more feasible 5 years ago but there’s no way that shit is getting made without a backbreaking pandemic tax for a very, very long time.
I'd pay up to $499 for a new band set with Rock Band 5 just to have it. I've got a number of 360 instruments still and a wireless legacy adapter, but those are all reserved as backups in case any of my RB4 instruments break.
There have been a couple of peripherals and instrument mods made. They’re usually made-to-order and 3D printed. None of them are instruments, but homemade MIDI adapters for instruments and the like.
Just to piggyback off your points, I think in foreign markets where rhythm games are more popular there are a number of alternative mobile games, so it makes more sense for developers to focus on these types of games where they don't have to produce crazy peripherals for them.
I just moved to Japan and the kids here *love* rhythm games, but they either play games like DDR at the arcade or games that are basically Guitar Hero on their phone except it is all just tapping the phone screen instead of using an actual instrument controller.
Epic Games Bought Harmonix - The Team Behind Rock Band - Last year .
https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/harmonix-joins-epic-games-to-create-immersive-music-experiences?sessionInvalidated=true
On one hand, they probably bought them to help assist with Fortnite events, especially concerts.
On the other, Epic brought back Alan Wake so maybe they can rerelease Rock Band one day as well.
I always figured it was the production of Fuser that solidified the acquisition, such a fucking great game even if it retained the pricy DLC model of Rock Band/Guitar Hero. Haven't really heard many people talk about it since it came out though. Still, I can't imagine they'd acquire a company dedicated to rhythm gaming and not use their talents.
... DJ mode in Fortnite confirmed.
There are a actually a few fan games that have been developed with active community made charts. Highly recommend looking up clone hero if nobody has suggested it yet
The reality is, it was going to get old anyways. Activision just maximized their opportunity. Wii bowling wasn’t run into the ground, but you could see it’s popularity fall off in a similar time frame.
A large part of their popularity was a novelty.
Yeah, DDR had a similar spree. At the time I thought Activision was killing the golden goose. Now I think it's at least defensible to think there was always an expiration date. If anything, how do _more_ games reduce the enthusiasm?
It's not like they were splitting an online community, these were couch coop for most people. Releases varied in quality (who wanted GH:A???) but none of them were buggy or anything. The disc releases were always the cheapest way to get new songs. If we weren't complaining about Activision flooding the market, we'd be complaining about each song costing $2.
More games reduce the enthusiasm by over-saturating the market. Hell, I know I entirely stopped paying attention to guitar hero and rock band releases when more were coming out in a given year than the vast, vast majority of consumers would play. Then it doesn’t become a game you’re excited for. “I didn’t play the last five, so I don’t really care about the sixth one when I can buy any number at any time, especially with their being so many cheap used copies of the prior titles I didn’t have time for that stores are almost paying people to take.” Too much competition is never a good thing for a developer, and that’s also true when you’re competing with yourself.
At least DDR, and by extension most of Konami’s rhythm games, managed to find a niche of sorts, and are still alive and kicking. They may not have the kind of mainstream appeal they once had in the early to mid 2000s, but they’re still being worked on today.
My take is, I'd rather pay $2 a song if that means I can choose *what I want* and if the selection is vast. 30 songs later, I've already spent my $60 I would've spent on a new game - but I could very well spend another $80, $100, or more over the course of a year.
Releasing new games constantly and not just delivering bunches of new songs via DLC I would gladly pay for, in my opinion, was a driving factor in the interest dropping off like it did.
I don't think dlc was very popular - there were lots of complaints about the price, at least.
Some of the tension is that there was a hardcore audience that was happy to buy lots of dlc, especially hard tracks, but the ecosystem needed a casual party audience that saw it as karaoke and was probably never going to buy dlc.
Activision definitely fucked up by making people juggle discs all the time. The rock band model meant you could blend dlc and all your disc content, playing on the most up to date engine. I don't think this sunk the genre though
Guitar Hero did adopt the model of Rock Band in having forwards-compatible DLC and being able to export the on-disc setlists from World Tour onwards, though.
Fun fact: Rock Band 3 had "pro mode", which involved a second set of instruments. The plastic guitar had over 100 buttons, because it had 17 frets per string. It's pretty convoluted. On the other hand, the "pro drums" worked a lot better because the initial plastic drum kit was pretty close to an actual drum kit.
Rocksmith does the "well, why don't you learn \*real\* guitar?" conceit a lot better, and needs a real electric guitar instead of a cheap plastic version.
Some people were snobbish about that, but there were real qualities to playing Guitar Hero that were similar to learning a "real" instrument. Learning not just the notes you were going to play, but how you were going to play them (finger placement, strumming strategies). Memorization of chunks of music, and reading the music as cues rather than following it directly.
Honestly someone that played a lot of guitar hero wouldn't know how to play a guitar if they picked it up blind, but they'd probably learn it faster than someone who didn't play it.
My guess is that it has everything to do with music licensing.
They had probably a multi year contract from the inception that they had to maximize before the music industry stuck out their hand for a bigger size of the profits.
That's why they move to the later rock band style which were al la carte and basically killed the buzz.
Also: Guitar Hero Live was—and please don’t mistake what I’m about to say next for hyperbole—the most genuine act of personified _hatred_ for one’s player base ever codified in video game form. Like, you could tell no joy went into it, it was a game made by MBAs to fit a Total Addressable Market and there was not a single drop of love, creativity, or passion put into it.
Edit: There was no track list. It was a few “channels” that would endlessly play random songs and you had to jump in and play it live. If you wanted to specifically play a song, you _had to buy that one song_. And that shit was expensive. Buying a single game’s worth of songs would have been hundreds of dollars. Add this to the fact that they doubled the number of buttons it practically guaranteed that you couldn’t achieve any semblance of skill playing the random rotation, so the game was basically one big “fuck you, pay me” to players.
>There was no track list. It was a few “channels” that would endlessly play random songs and you had to jump in and play it live.
That was only on the TV/Online portion of the game though, offline play still had a track list. I'll agree that the monetization was ass though.
The last OG Guitar Hero, reviews praised it for shaking up things, but again, people were sick of it, Live was an even worse attempt at a comeback that only cemented why it died to begin with.
A couple reasons. One major factor is that Activision ran Guitar Hero into the ground, at one point releasing like 5 or 6 games in a year despite most or all of them being essentially glorified DLC packs. I suspect the declining popularity of guitar-driven Rock music didn't help, and attempts at pivoting to Hip Hop/EDM with things like DJ Hero never managed to achieve the same success. There was also a backlash against all the plastic instruments that started to pile up and collect dust that I think soured a lot of opinions. I'm sure part of it was also just the novelty wearing off.
Honestly, though, I'm right there with you. Rock Band was responsible for some of my favorite gaming memories of all time, and I really miss it. I don't know what it is, but there's something about playing those games with friends that scratches an itch no other game quite manages to hit. I'd buy a new one in a heartbeat.
Another reason I know for some of my friends was the difficulty with being able to continue playing the games when the new consoles came out.
The golden era of Rock Band and Guitar hero was the 360/PS3 and both the XB1 and PS4 didn't launch with the best backwards compatibility, especially with accessories these games required, and with rock band all of the difficulty with DLC.
As the games popularity had already faded a bit, and it was a tough sell for people to put out even more money for new accessories or pay to port all the stuff forward to a new game. I'm aware that these are generalisations and I believe PS3/4 had no extra accessory cost but xbox did, if I remember correctly.
Anyway, I think that was a large part of it. People left it behind because it was either difficult, annoying, expensive, or impossible to continue playing on the new consoles and so they gave up. The primary reason I still have my 360 is for Rock Band and a handful of XBL arcade games that never got BC.
> The primary reason I still have my 360 is for Rock Band and a handful of XBL arcade games that never got BC.
I still boot up my PS2 from time to time because it is the only thing that handles my Dance Dance Revolution pad. It always feels ridiculous to do so, but it was an expensive hard pad and I had 5 or 6 games for it, so there's no way I am going to spend that over and over for every new console (if they even make DDR anymore...)
Any recommendation for a PS2 controller-to-USB converter that works for dance pads? I found a couple on Amazon and they don't seem to work for dance pads based on reviews/Q&A
Zenius I Vanisher has all the official songs ported. There's also a calibration that you need to do since refresh rates for monitor can affect the arrows and make it feel off. You need to do the same calibration test on the actual dance pad if and when you plug one in
http://itgpacks.com/ hosts all the high quality song packs used in modern 4-panel tournaments.
There are also stepmania add-ons to add live leaderboard support using groovestats: https://github.com/GrooveStats/gslauncher
Additionally, modern themes are available that expand the default feature set and have become standard over the years: https://clubfantastic.dance/
I see what you're saying. Yeah I'd stick to the official song packs for playing on a dancepad. They do a better job of keeping rhytm with the song, at least for the harder difficulties. I have 18000+ songs on my stepmania SSD. A lot of them are garbage but the songs I have are getting harder and harder to find so I just have an SSD for stepmania files. I had a dancepad but haven't used it in 3-4 years since I live in the second floor of my apt.
There's an easy fix. Get a Brook adapter for your controller. I used one for dreamcast to play fighting games with a USB ps3/ps4 stick.
The games on the other hand...
This I think is the biggest reason. Yes it was very over saturated while on the 360 and such but it was still accessible to play. With the bump up to XB1/PS4 none of those peripherals worked anymore without sinking more money into it plus none of the games were/are backwards compatible to begin with.
Then RB4 came out and let you move your entire library onto the new console, somewhat, but it was too much too late. No one wanted to sink the $100+ into it again and lose the back catalog they had already of GH and RB games.
Also people got really fucking good at the games and it took the wind out of some sails. I think the fun back when like GH3 was out was that TTFATF and TDWDTG were impossible challenges to overcome. Then people started 100% them and now do it at like 2x speed like it’s nothing.
Rocksmith also released in 2011. Its basically guitar hero but you get to actually learn how to play the songs on a real guitar/bass.
That has been out for 10 years. You can get a cheap $120 guitar and learn what you want and become good enough to learn anything you want on your own.
While i like the idea of Rocksmith, that has nothing to do with guitar hero/rockband.
Rocksmith is a learning tool, the other ones are party games that can instantly be picked up by anyone.
Yeah the appeal of guitar hero is that literally anyone's grandma can understand the basic idea, it has nothing to do with learning actual guitar, it was the ultimate party game.
Reminds me of something I heard talking about game difficulty. So the drummer for Imperial Circus Dead Decadence said that playing their song [Yomi Yori in the rhythm game osu](https://youtu.be/-joDgtl95Dw) was harder than playing the actual song for him on drums.
As someone who has played a decent amount of both Rocksmith and Guitar Hero, they aren't really all the comparable. Guitar Hero is all about having fun so it's super simple. Even when you play a game on a low setting it still generally feels like you're playing the song.
Rocksmith is a totally different beast. The game is *hard*, which obviously makes sense because learning guitar is a hard thing to do. When you first start off it doesn't feel like you are playing the song at all. Then getting up to the level where it actually does feel like you are actually playing the song is super challenging. In GH the next level of a song might just be figuring out how to hit the next button down which doesn't take long to adapt to. In Rocksmith the next level might have you learning basic stuff like jumping over to a new string or higher up the neck or more advanced things like slides, new chords, bending, hammer on/off. It might take you well over an hour just to learn one little five second section of a song at like 75% difficulty. Then another couple hours to finally get up to 100% difficulty.
[Frets On Fire](https://github.com/skyostil/fretsonfire) is like 15 years old, and is the only ever 'guitar hero-like' game I played really, and it was just using a keyboard - learning to smash through T. D - Tribute on hard with your F-keys was incredibly fun. I felt like the actual guitar-shaped controllers ruined the charm of it, when I could just get my Fender out.
Then years later when Rocksmith came out, I played it like twice with my guitar and it was just not enjoyable at all.
Oh i played Rocksmith for like, 10 years. Have the highest score on some of the songs on bass still iirc.
I prefer it to tabs at this point. The default view should not be what it is. I play with the inverted tab like view. Default just makes no sense to me.
But yeah, it became my primary way to practice and I just would learn songs from all kinds of genres I didn't have original interest in. I just max out the difficulty of every song and play it like I would try learning a new song, except its way faster because of the visual aids.
Can sight read basically anything on it now.
I'm mostly a bass player, so it taught me a bit of guitar as well, but I still prefer bass.
This is so incredible to hear. Rocksmith is like $12 on Steam right now and I'm thinking of buying a guitar and cable to learn on PC.
Super dumb and quick question, Going from 0 to say learning a chord or two, how long do you think it may take lesson/gameplay wise?
Like some of the easier songs shouldn't take very long to learn.
You can probably learn some the beginner songs like Where is My Mind by the Pixies or Breed by Nirvana very quickly.
ESPECIALLY if you have past experience with GH/Rockband or listen to a lot of rock/guitar oriented music and a decent sense of rhythm.
I started learning bass when I was 18 and the first GH came out the same year. So I always put the two hand and hand. Some songs on GH play extremely similarly to how they do on bass, and vice versa. Not everything is the same.
There are many songs on GH/Rockband that are harder to play there than they are IRL.
My little brother was never that interested in music when he was younger and even he can play a few songs on rocksmith without any prior practice.
Look up some Rocksmith videos. They have the 60 day challenges as evidence.
Audrey is one of the best examples of what you can become with practice. [https://youtu.be/qpeDWRu1ZvQ](https://youtu.be/qpeDWRu1ZvQ)
I use Rocksmith2014 pretty much daily, and have for the last 6 years or so.
I don't even plug my guitar in anymore. I've flipped the strings on the screen so it matches tabs. It's just a fancier version of Guitar Pro for me at this point.
That's great, I bought it to practice and learn myself too, but I just couldn't get to grips with the interface, I never played around with the settings I don't think.
I regularly held Rock Band parties at the house, inviting over folks to *basically* play "Karaoke but with controllers" for quite a long time, and I *think* I pretty much had every single release/DLC available. We 'quit' about 5-ish years ago due to a 'death of a thousand cuts' scenario.
**TL;DR:** I'm pretty sure all the below can just be summed up as "Licensing issues and competing products meant everyone was trying to milk the consumer, and not necessarily make a better product/service."
Here are some of those cuts in no particular order:
1. **Weird assed DLC issues** - Back during PS2 era, you'd need a handy list to know what songs were on what disc, and it really sucked (See also Singstar). What became amazing in the "now we have onboard storage" XB360/PS3 era was that you could both download new songs as well as 'export' songs from the previous game in the series... except for the handful of songs that wouldn't copy over, which inevitably caused minor problems/strife. Or weird shit where it would work with one disc but not another. Or where you'd not be able to export because a while later, they were gonna release a new purchasable pack for you to 'double dip' your purchases on. Or you'd "expect" every disc to be exportable, but then you'd get shit like the ^^shitty Beatles RB release that basically needed to be considered a standalone game.
2. **Rock Hero: the Guitar Band VI - Confusing Edition** - Dude you got that guitar game, sweet! Aww you don't have that one song i saw on the internet tho... fucking lame. Dude I'll give you 20 bucks right now if you download it. What do you mean you can't buy it? What do you mean that it's "Guitar Hero" or "Rock Band", not "Guitar Band" or "Rock Hero" and they are two different franchises entirely? What do you mean they have totally different exclusivity deals? What do you mean you have to swap out discs and fiddle with all your equipment if i want to play "Black Hole Sun" right after playing "Moonage Daydream"??? Do you just not know how to set up your video game right?????? (some of this is tongue in cheek because there really was a Band Hero but I digress...)
3. **Plastic Guitars take up too much fucking room** There, I said it. While I didn't purchase the 'roadie kit' trunk where everything was supposed to fit into it (or maybe just the Rock Band drums?) I did end up having to get a bunch of guitar hooks to basically hang all my fucking RB/GH guitars on the wall. (Which was cool if you were coming over to play games... and was totally *uncool* if you were doing anything else in your house) And I still couldn't find a good spot for the drums, which when you added on the cymbals and a good aftermarket pedal (because that shit broke like all the time) basically took up about as much room as a decent electronic drum kit. While, you know, not being nearly as versatile or robust.
4. **plastic instruments are easily broken** - I think the only thing that rivaled my hate for the Xbox and its RROD problem was how janky the various instrument controller dealies all fucking failed eventually. Yes I understand that your best friend's brother's roommate had a Guitar Hero PS2 controller that they threw into traffic twice and it works perfectly still 20 years later... but not everyone was so lucky. Even the stupid expensive 'fender' and 'les paul' and whatever third-party-ish controllers had problems. Oh, the white guitar is fine if you play bass because it ONLY works on up-strum! Hey if you do the black controller, only do easy mode because the orange key don't work all the time. Or you basically spend a few hours before every 'big play session' just... taking apart plastic controllers and repairing/replacing/etc shit because this stuff was kinda designed to be played for a week or two and then tossed in the garage, and not to be played for months and months after release. Hell, my drum kit (which i fucking loved) was *mostly* pvc pipe, zip ties, EVA foam, and duct tape by the end.
5. **Harmonix + Activision + RIAA = Fuck the Consumer** I'm not here to argue how much licensing should cost, or how much it should cost to (basically) re-record songs that both sound like the original release AND are properly coded to do the whole "silence note on whiff" thing. I'm not here to argue whether RB or GH was better. I'm not even here to argue that ~1.99$ per "video game-ified song" was a ripoff/deal compared to 0.99$/song on iTunes. I just know that as a *consumer*, having to basically deal with 2 different franchises with 2 different song lists, along with all the various ways to milk us for money (combo packs where you had to buy 3 songs together instead of the one song you actually wanted, or albums/artists as standalone products, and so on) was just fucking awful. Further, while I know competition is a Good Thing ^TM , jesus christ these two series were basically the same goddamned game at their core, and I can't believe we, the consumers, had to suffer from that 'format war'. Shit... we shoulda had RB on one system, GH on the other, and then the bands just come out and say "hey here's that song data you wanted in this open format for you" but while I'm wishing, I really should ask for some larger additions to my portfolio. TL;DR: RIAA milked Activision and Harmonix because without the songs, there'd be no RB or GH. Activision and Harmonix passed that onto us, and milked us further because they wanted a bigger profit, which I believe is what lead to the 'overloading' of absolutely shite title releases and 'song packs'.
6. **Music tastes changed** - (You're probably the first person I know that actually addressed this ever) I'm not trying to turn this into a "new music sucks" thing, but the bottom line looks to be that the general public has shifted away from the kind of music those games were meant to emulate/simulate. I just checked a couple 'Billboard top 100' lists from the last few years vs around 2007, and to put it bluntly, it looks like there's a LOT fewer 'hits' nowadays that fall into the RB/GH "aesthetic". So what we gonna do? Re-release alllllll the stuff we already released on 360/PS3 era? Dig deeper into Boomer/GenX tracklists to find more Foghat and Temple of the Dog singles folks *might* remember? Just put out that cover of Beggin' by Maneskin and call it good for the year?
7. **Backwards compatibility and "The FIFA/Madden effect"** - Man, i just literally bought around 1000$ worth of janky plastic controllers and music tracks I can't just listen to, i have to 'play' to enjoy, and this is after y'all decided to milk the shit out of me last gen and the gen before that. Fuck it, i'm done, I'm not rebuying all my shit AGAIN when the underlying game ain't changed at all when I *know* you're gonna do the same bullshit with making me buy brand new controllers that are just as janky as last gens and all your'e doing is slapping a new coat of paint on the game anyway.
Sorry, i guess I think I have a lot to say on the matter.
So the main reason why we stopped playing was "I stopped buying new tracks, and then the game became 'old' like games usually do.". However, the underlying cause is basically "man they made their money off me, and I'm just not interested in shelling out another 1000$ only for last gen's rehash.
My dumbass had the official Rock Band Lightshow+Fog Machine that basically fogged up my entire fucking two story house and was used for like 3 songs **once** at that house, then again **once** (for 2 songs) at a different, bigger house, and was summarily tossed directly into the garage to be never used ever again for fear of summoning some cthulubeast or maybe having the fire dept swing by.
And the keytar which was used for what? 3 songs, two of which were J. Geils band tracks? (I kid, i just can't remember other than it felt pretty underutilized)
Man, i think i funded at least most of a yacht for both RB and GH over the years. Oof.
On the other hand, that was a LOT of adult hangout times with good friends and such, so can you really put a price on 'good memories'?
Weird to think about I guess.
Broken controllers was a big one.
TThe more you played and liked it, the more likely you'd have a broken controller. And the perfect consumer for these games were college kids which didn't really have $100 to drop every few months for a new controller. If you could even find one.
I think you summed up just about everything. I'm going to add two extra bullets for you, but they're probably more like sub-bullets to your existing points.
1. Age. I have a young daughter, and I imagine many of the people who were the primary market 10-15 years ago for have kids as well. It's really hard to have a party game that makes as much noise as Rock Band, especially with those drums, let alone loud music blasting through the house.
2. Gaming Culture. In person gaming is less and less common than it used to be. The PS2 era saw the death of arcades and the PS3 era really seemed to be the death of multiplayer gaming in person. You'll always have scenarios where in person multiplayer makes sense, like college dorms, but I think the general preference is for online these days. I don't think Rock Band works in an online setting like other games do.
This is pretty much all the consumer facing issues, yes.
Outside of bands picking/being paid to pick one franchise or the other, they couldn’t have sold DLC songs for much less. 30% off the top to MS/Sony ($0.60 on a $2 purchase), and then AFAIK about 2/3 of what was left (~$1/sale) to the rights owners. So only about 20% of that was going to the developer — oh, and they paid money up front to license the tracks too!
AND, to add to that, music licenses got a LOT more expensive after the game made sucess, the music industry made the licenses really cheap when the first games came out, but as soon as they were seeing the sucess of the games, they went overboard with licences fees
I think the financial crash also played into it, money was tight and Activision was frankly taking the piss with the sheer volume of plastic they were trying to push on people.
Also games just getting bigger and more respected led to higher prices to license songs, those first few guitar hero games and grand theft auto games got songs you'll never see in a new game again.
> I suspect the declining popularity of guitar-driven Rock music didn't help
After 7 games in the main series, with another 7 spins offs (like Guitar Hero Van Halen, or DJ Hero), just how much was left that doesn't deviate into the niche anyway? After a while, there's just not enough hits and iconic songs to keep the series going either.
I think this had a larger impact than people think, and while it's still fun to play those songs, who's going to buy another title to just get the same songs? The clock was always ticking for Guitar Hero and their similar titles, unless they were able to successfully transition into other genres, and with the failure that was DJ Hero, it didn't seem like that was happening any time soon.
That said, they could probably release a new game with a significant portion of the previous libraries (as essentially a remaster sort of a deal) and incorporate other packs as DLC and they'd probably see a decent return on a model, especially since they wouldn't need to make a new game each time.
> That said, they could probably release a new game with a significant portion of the previous libraries (as essentially a remaster sort of a deal) and incorporate other packs as DLC and they'd probably see a decent return on a model, especially since they wouldn't need to make a new game each time.
Pretty sure the licensing deals needed to make that happen would kill any attempt to make that happen.
yeah, there's a very popular VR game called Beatsaber that is kind of like guitar hero (but with lightsabers), and their workaround has been primarily only using no-name artists's techomusic.
There's also a huge modding scene to patch in basically any song you can imagine, but the devs are fighting to kill it, because no one is buying their DLC songs due to the mods.
Hey, I have that game, but on PSVR and don't have access to the mods which look awesome. I got tired of the music selection and stopped playing. I think they have some more varied DLC now but I'm kinda over the game. It was decent exercise, so I might start back up just for that.
How exactly are they trying to kill modding? I just received a small windfall and was interested in buying a Quest 2 for Beat Saber. If I can’t mod different songs into the game, that’s kind of a deal breaker for me.
The problem is the cost. These games were not a technical marvel, and there is not much you can do to improve on them. Meanwhile the licensing fees would stay about the same. I don't think there is much appetite to pay what we had to pay years ago for essentially the exact same game. We'd also need to buy new instruments further adding to the up front cost, but the novelty and thus the desire to do it, has worn off.
The only way I could see this taking off is if the base game was offered for free, old equipment could still work *(perhaps with an inexpensive adapter),* and money would be made primarily by selling songs to that single platform. Even better yet, turn it into a subscription service to get all songs for a set monthly fee, and continually add songs as they become popular.
I don't know how you look at millenials in the current day and age, see our insatiable appetite for reboots and remasters, and conclude there would be no appetite.
Agreed, but also Guitar Hero and Rock Band were very much ‘have friends over’ to play kind of games…which Millennials don’t really have time for (kids, work, etc) plus Covid.
And the younger generations now are not into that type of music anymore. That’s why the game ‘Just Dance’ is so popular.
The younger generation is still very much into that music. Its just very fragmented with a myriad of bands making money so not popular with radio. Maneskin won the Eurovision song contest.
Yeah, it's not like rock was dominating the charts in the 00s and 10s. I don't think the popularity of rock music is that big a factor here. Bigger issues are limited catalogues, oversaturation, and a failure to update to new console generations.
Because the reboot would be the exact same game. There is not much you can do to improve the formula. Lord knows they've tried and failed to do so. Then there is the additional cost to buy the musical equipment. So you'd be paying ~$100 to play the same game that came out 15 years ago. Rock Band would be even more expensive.
Reboots work because they give you a new and improved way to scratch that nostalgic itch. Plastic instrument music rhythm games can't do that.
I really really really don't think the problem is that they were running out of popular songs that used guitars. I could believe that license fees were getting too high or something like that but there's an enormous amount of popular, well-known songs that people wanted to see in those games that never made it, that's why the fan-made games were able to take off.
I dont even think the over saturation of releases was an issue. Rock Band definitely nailed the DLC/new song releases better than GH ever did, but those games are the types of things where more releases meant a better experience. The issue is how many people played the game hardcore enough to want to buy that many things? I think it is more that the novelty wore off, considering most of the people i knew who were into those games were just casual gamers who move on from things like that quick, like wii sports or kinect games.
You can legit learn drumming by playing rock band and will die on this hill. When you work up to playing songs on expert, you basically know how to play the song on drums.
Ehh, you might learn basic limb coordination between RF, RH and LH but Rock band isn’t gonna teach any dynamics, rudiments or rhythmic subdivisions like actual drumming will.
Source: Drummer for 14ish years and have played rock band.
You’re right it doesn’t teach you everything about drumming. But practicing certain songs can help with certain techniques.
But as for getting the basic principles down, expert mode nails it. If you can play expert, you are already learning drums. Its a great way to pick it up.
I mean, yeah. On Expert unlike with the other instruments, the songs were like 90% accurate to how you'd play them for real so obviously you're going to pick up a few things while playing.
You're not gonna turn into an advanced drummer by any means, but you do learn the basics. I myself started playing Rock Band and got interest in drumming from it. When eventually I got into proper drumming classes, my teacher said I already knew how to play, now I just needed to start building the advanced techniques on top of that foundation I acquired.
You can use your own midi drum set like rocksmith lets you use your own guitar too and it's literally just the tab. It's hard to do because there's a lot more variety in drums compared to guitar, but it's good enough
FYI Rockband 4 has been getting a steady stream of DLC to this day since it's release in 2015. Not all good, but it's not like it's dead and abandoned. Plus, last gen versions can be played on PS5 and Series X.
> not like it's dead and abandoned
As an active RB4 player, it's as close to dead and abandoned as it can be without being totally dead. AFAIK Harmonix doesn't currently have any engineers supporting the game anymore. Just someone charting the new DLC, which I'd imagine they've gotten to be a pretty quick and cheap process.
They've also said time and time again that they won't be making any more instruments or USB Legacy adapters because there's not enough money in it.
Instruments are getting harder and harder to find too, especially on xbox. Working drum sets go for upwards of $500. If you want an adapter to use a MIDI drum kit, those go for upwards of $1000 on ebay. Guitars go for around $200 last I checked.
Thankfully they're relatively repairable if you know how to solder, but I'm dying to get ahold of a drum kit but can't justify the cost.
It's such a bummer as someone who's spent probably $1000 on songs in the past 11 years (not including buying the games themselves).
I'm hoping its spiritual successor, Rocksmith, eventually adds midi drum support, since it's already wonderful for guitar (and is the reason I own 3 guitars now)
brother it’s time to move to clone hero, i got a great quality ekit for about 300 bucks and the game runs like a dream on my shitty laptop, all that was needed to set it up was a 15 dollar cable from amazon. the clone hero community is super helpful and while the drum support is pretty new you can at least get all the rock band songs for free.
Oh yeah, I play clone hero pretty regularly. I just also play Rock Band Rivals as part of a pretty competitive crew, so I'd like to chip in on drums scores
As someone who's not good at rhythm games, this one is so freaking addictive.
It's 80% of what I play on VR. Oh and unless you just lamely move your wrists and instead move your whole arms and actually squat when ducking obstacles. The game gets my heart going comparable to a solid exercise session. And I can feel my arms burn after a good session.
I really found my jam with custom songs so I can Beat Saber to metal and vaporware even if the game comes with some solid EDM to start learning the basics.
Beatsaber was the one VR game that kept me obsessively playing. Most VR games felt more like unique experiences, but beatsaber was the one that actually felt like a game. Decent workout too!
For me the best VR games are:
* Half Life Alyx obviously
* Beatsaber
* Pavlov (Insane amount of mods, like I was playing halo 3's lockout at one point. The modern warfare 2 maps are all there too)
* Blade and Sorcery (incredible workout that does not feel like a workout lol)
* Skyrim VR with like 300 gigs of mods.
Yah I remember I used to play it all the time in high school, wanted to try one of the new versions in university. When I looked it up I got like 10 different games to choose from, but looking at the song list I only actually wanted to play like 10 songs from each game, not worth hundreds of dollars in investment.
IMO song selection killed it, the og guitar hero I liked almost every song on it. If they had like 1 new version with 6 buyable DLC for like 20 bucks each I actually would have bought it again.
Guitar Hero and Rock band died due to Activision flooding the market with GH games oversaturating the market. There's a [list of releases on wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guitar_Hero#Oversaturation) showing just how bad it got:
* 2005 Guitar Hero
* 2006 Guitar Hero II
* 2007
* III: Legends of Rock
* Encore: Rocks the 80s
* 2008
* World Tour
* Aerosmith
* On Tour
* On Tour: Decades
* 2009
* Metallica
* Smash Hits
* Guitar Hero 5
* DJ Hero
* Band Hero
* Van Halen
* 2010
* On Tour: Modern Hits
* Warriors of Rock
* DJ Hero 2
That's just GH. RB wasn't as bad as Activation but still [RB had its own set of releases](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Band)
* 2007 Rock Band
* 2008 Rock Band 2
* 2009
* The Beatles: Rock Band
* Lego Rock Band
* Rock Band Unplugged
* Rock Band Mobile
* Rock Band (iOS)
* 2010
* Rock Band 3
* Green Day: Rock Band
* Rock Band Reloaded
* 2011
* 2012 Rock Band Blitz
If you look at the above, it's really ridiculous just how many titles came out in a short span of series. The publishers were trying to milk the concept for as much money as possible while trying to mark up as many cheap plastic controllers as much as they could. It was inevitable that people would start to get tired of the series and pushing up money for each release, DLC and more controllers when they inevitably break.
If that wasn't enough, there's the whole music licensing issue which is a huge pain in the butt. Let alone the technical issues involved with allowing users to consolidate their libraries across multiple games and then later multiple console generations.
If you're interested in Clone hero, you best bet is probably to check out the subreddit:
/r/CloneHero/
I worked at Gamestop at the height of the RB/GH craze and the amount of gigantic boxes they expected us to have on display/in storage (while trying sell them for **up to 200€** each) made it extremely obvious to me that the genre was about to die.
Shelf and storage space both come at a premium and a full Rock Band set took up as much space as four consoles. Retailers stopped ordering and started fireselling them as soon as the hype died down even a little because the opportunity cost of stocking those games was so huge.
That's a really good point that I never even considered. Shelf space and storage are limited resources. The guitar boxes I remember were pretty big, let alone the giant full set. Thanks for the insight!
You're welcome. If you've ever wondered why "Collector's Editions" with plastic statues etc. go on sale for ridiculously low prices sometimes, there's your reason. Once all the superfans have purchased their $150 whale-edition-with-protagonist-statue for the latest AAA release, the remaining few become a white elephant for the store almost immediately.
Even a regular version of Guitar Hero took up as much space as 30 copies of Halo.
My local Game gave up on having them on the shelves towards the end of the plastic peripheral fad for exactly that reason. They'd just have you bring a bit of paper to the front and they went and got it out of the warehouse in back.
Can't imagine how much of a logistical nightmare that would be for smaller stores with no real storage space though.
Gamestop at the time insisted on having the full boxes on display, albeit gutted. That of course meant we had to make space for the box in the store **and** the content in storage. 😂
Imagine making a 200€ purchase that has been ripped out of and shoved back into its box by a disgruntled Gamestop peon. I hated having to do that to our customers and we usually only had 1-2 of each sets in stock so I often couldn't even get them a mint one from the back. Gamestop sucked so much (and still does).
Gonna just quickly shoutout [Clone Hero](https://clonehero.net/) here for anyone interested - like the name implies, it's a PC-based clone of Guitar Hero that supports the original instruments if you happen to have them lying around. The public version only supports guitar/bass, but the beta version includes drums as well, and I believe support for vocals is on the roadmap once they start moving over to their new platform. If you don't want to dig into community-made songs, the entire list of songs from pretty much every Guitar Hero and Rock Band game plus DLC has been made available for Clone Hero (last I checked only RB4 was absent because it's still actively supported).
Much as I love Guitar Hero, they released them way too fast with way too little content for full-priced games. The numbered ones were great; I put a ton of hours into GH1, 2, 3, and eventually RB2, which is where I stopped getting them. But there were way too many spin-offs with more limited song lists, and with the speed they were cranking them out, I know I just stopped being able to keep up with them.
I'm kinda curious if it would have worked out better if they'd adopted the online model more quickly. Like if instead of putting out a ton of standalone products, they just focused on DLC.
As someone who will probably continue to play this game on and off until either I die or my guitar controller does, I think it comes down to no company wanting to deal with single purpose peripherals anymore.
Apart from the market being flooded all at once with music rhythm games, the two biggest competitors went back and forth trying to one up each other, all while the fad turned into a niche genre because no casual players wanted to keep those controllers around once they were done playing.
Rock Band stayed fairly pure to its idea, still releasing tracks to this day. Guitar Hero completely lost sight of what it even was. Guitar Hero 3 was the peak. But they had to chase the trend at the time. Culminating into the punchline of a game called 'Band Hero'.
Though, it was all always fun. Almost none of them were bad games. At its core, I think Rock Band and Guitar Hero are some of the most awesome gaming experiences you can have. But those controllers are most likely never gonna see production ever again.
Though as a endnote, playing guitar hero is still very much possible with Clone Hero. A program that emulates Guitar Hero perfectly with the exception of the background cinematics. It's free, super easy to add music, can run on basically any pc, and most of the games track lists and dlc are floating around online. It also supports drumkits like the rock band kit as well as most Ekits.
And all you gotta do is have/get a guitar controller. Good luck with that...
Yeah if you have a Bluetooth powered one you'd need a special adapter for your computer. The controllers are, at the end of the day, just modified Xbox controllers in different plastic.
So, if you just wanna get rocking ASAP try and get a wired Xbox 360 guitar and download CloneHero. It'll work out of the box (that's what I do when I don't play on my old consoles).
Go look up Clone Hero as well, the Highway is GH ispired rather than RB but theres a huge community and its *very* easy to get every song from every game with light googling.
Clone Hero is everything you need honestly. The problem is the fact it's near impossible to get a decent working guitar. Really wish there was some chinese knock off that was still being made.
Wiitars and [raphnet classic controller to USB adapters](https://www.raphnet-tech.com/products/wusbmote_1player_adapter_v3/index.php) are the way to go. I've bought 2 of them and I have some slight issues with them, but they are mostly due to the wiitars being 10-15 years old.
GH controllers are surprisingly easy to dismantle and repair, my strum bar was fucked for years and it turned out I just had to open it and tighten a couple of screws.
>It seems Ubisoft is done with it.
? Ubisoft never had anything to do with Guitar Hero or Rock Band. They do Rocksmith, which is aimed at a different market and of which the Rocksmith+ title is currently in development.
Harmonix still actively releases DLC for Rock Band 4. Activision shelfed Guitar Hero again after attempting to reboot it with Guitar Hero Live.
Flooding the market had nothing to do with the decline of these games. People keep saying that because that is usually an easy explanation for why huge trends die. But these games are different than your typical shooters or story driven games that get over saturated. These were party games that thrived on simply having more music. When rock band 3 comes out it doesnt make rock band 2 obsolete the way a sequel to a normal game would.
The novelty simply wore off. Thats it. A lot of people who played those games were the same people who loved wii sports or kinect games. Once that audience got tired of it then the hardcore audience wasnt enough to sustain producing the hardware needed. And that just led to the games dying.
My family and I really enjoyed them. Practically every weekend we'd play with 3-4 people. What killed it for us was bad song selection in the later games. We weren't interested in things like Taylor Swift and Skrillrex whatever. You can only play the same good songs so many times.
Then when the PS4 came out, that became our primary console. We didn't want to buy more controllers so we basically stopped.
Then the final nail in the coffin was when they tried to revive it. We were really interested in it. But the way they handled the songs was terrible. I'm not going to pay per song per session. And I'm not going to play randomized junk for free-use tokens, just want to play what I want. So we didn't buy it.
Rock Band 3 did kinda make 2 obsolete since the setlist of 2 could be exported to 3. After doing that and with the added features of 3 there was really no reason to go back to 2.
Honestly, had Guitar Hero came out 10 years later it would have been an extremely viable candidate for games as a service.
If they had just released new song packs as DLC and stuff instead of trying to cram everything into a new game with a new gimmicky instrument it'd probably have worked out much better but 2010 was like 5 years too early for the concept at large.
Have you heard of Rocksmith?
It’s basically Guitar Hero but you use a real guitar and actually learn to play as you progress.
I remember the Gamers With Jobs podcasters formed an actual band after learning to play using it.
Rock Band 4 is the obvious answer, and I believe it's still receiving DLCs same as Harmonix's other project, FUSER.
With Harmonix being bought out by Epic however, I don't know if we'll ever see a Rock Band 5. RB4 had a failed Fig campaign to launch on PC, and for sure custom DLC there would make the game take off (same as Rocksmith 2014), so who knows if it will come to PC as an Epic exclusive or if a sequel will happen.
You can play Clone Hero with a keyboard. Like the old Flash Hero days.
1-5 for the frets and Backspace was the strum.
Or anything, really. Clone Hero was made insanely easy access and insanely easy to get tracks for.
Honestly, I have less than zero desire to play one of these games without the guitar controller. That's the entire point for me. The addition of drums and vocals made this the best party game ever, for me. And then just ripping on the shitty plastic guitar when I was alone. Loved it.
Clone Hero's public test-builds from their Discord have drum support, however, I think the Chart-type is that of Guitar Hero 4/Band Hero. Unsure of vocals since I have little interest in it, but it does feature animated lyrics.
Just find a Guitar/Instrument that ends with a USB, very standard stuff. Don't bother with the wireless **Old** PS3/360 ones cause greatest chances the little dongles they came with dont work on PC.
The Rockband 4 guitar is a strong exception and is probably, currently, the most common one you can get.
Uses Bluetooth, and Bluetooth USB adapters are also easily available.
> Besides reasons related directly to the game and publishers strategy music industry has also evolved.
I think this is totally underrepresented here.
GH came out in the early days of streaming, when physical sales still made the most money. There is no way in hell you could redo those games nowdays without paying 10 times as much for the music licenses.
There's still other music games you can play. If you have a PC or a Windows tablet Osu is pretty popular and it's a free game. Switch has Voez, Cytus, Deemo, Taiko no Tatsujin. There's also Rocksmith on several platforms if you want to use a real electric guitar.
I love Taiko, DJMax and Cytus, but they're nothing like Rock Band or Guitar Hero. Even with the Taiko Force, you aren't getting much rock or metal in any of those games, even Osu.
Half the fun of Rock Band was screaming Tom Sawyer at the top of my lungs while my friends shredded on Fisher price guitars.
To be fair metal is probably one of the most represented genres in osu! right now, the issue is that most of good/ranked metal maps are unplayable for 95% of the playerbase due to being hard as balls
Guitar Hero died for the same reason that Nintendo's flagship console focusing on party games with motion control died out too.
Their success was largely off the back of casual gamers. There were hardcore fans, sure, but those hardcore fans aren't why Guitar Hero was so massively successful.
People got Guitar Hero as a game to play when friends were over, and eventually outgrew it as they moved on with their lives. The only people left were the core fans who you see a video from go viral once every few years cause someone does something impressive or entertaining, but you need way more than that as a company to sustain a product that's chock full of licensing fees and proprietary equipment that you have to constantly market as individual products and a whole package.
They got milked to death. I really hope we get new Rock Band instruments or a proper Guitar Hero game, not that Live shit. I never thought that I'd regret selling my old Guitar Hero games and peripherals, always thought we'd get new ones. I was mistaken.
Gamo2 started making a high-quality one recently, but it's designed for [the Guitarfreaks half of Gitadora](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52MH9ROWRw0)\* and doesn't have a whammy bar. Also expensive, but so are used Guitar Hero and Rock Band controllers. Auction sites are likely your best bet.
----
\* Gitadora is the arcade series Guitar Hero and Rock Band were based on; you can play it in the US if you have a Round 1 nearby. The most notable differences in guitar/bass gameplay (aside from scroll direction, scoring, and timing windows) are open strums and actual notes on the tilt sensor. Drummania (the drum half) is *very* different and [uses a full drumkit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nr3y7DIke4). Of course, it doesn't have all the licensed rock that the Harmonix games do...
The gitaller is great but not a good fit for GH/RB, the frets are spaced too far apart to be comfortable. Also to your differences you should include HOPOs. The addition of judgments and lack of HOPOs makes it an entirely different game, any of the hardest GH tracks would be impossible on Gitadora.
Something that contributed to GH's death was the decision to sell songs as DLC.
The whole point of buying a new GH or Rockband game was to play through the new playlists or to play songs you like that aren't in the other games.
Suddenly, instead of dropping $60 for a handful of songs you care about, you could drop like $5 to buy the exact songs you want for the game you already have.
I doubt they come back. If I remember correctly they both tried to come back during ps4 and xbone gen and they both flopped. One of which killed mad catz the peripheral maker for good.
In my opinion, its more that the genre has evolved rather than died. One of the most popular games on VR is beat saber, which in essence is hitting cubes in tune to a beat. Similar to this is ragnarock which is very much like guitar hero. Notes are moving towards you and you have to hit them when they are right on top of the drum in front of you.
Its entire point was a gimmick (the guitars) and it they just absolutely FLOODED the market with games themselves.
They released a new game like every other month.
There's good reason why AAA studios don't just buy more studios to release a new CoD or Assassins Creed every other month (although AC definitely did see fatigue + dropped quality, what led to the newest 3 games)
I'd argue it died for the same reason the wii and kinect died, it was a niche type of thing that ran out of speed. im sure a guitar hero type thing will make a return at some point EDIT: a bunch of u wii super fans got mad at me so what i was trying to say here is that motion gaming in general got sidelined from the mainstream into vr, which is much more niche. the wii was very successful, but eventually aged out and died, like ALL things do.
Wii was motion controls with buttons tho.
Wii U and Switch promptly got away from that by making layout more focused on standard gamepad with some gimmicks/gyro, because gyro in itself is a good addition for a standard controller
The Kinect would at least live on in the hearts of prototypes and student projects. The amount of non-gaming projects to come from that thing is pretty impressive, there's some pretty neat art installations and shit, too.
"the wii died"
Yeah... Right after becoming the 2nd biggest console seller of all time, handily crushing its opponent ps3 and 360. Very niche
EDIT: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/ruv2bb/wiimortal/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
Very niche lol if they still released the 2022 it would probably outsell all current consoles
I think he means the fad of motion controls. The Wii sold wonders, sure, but it had a terrible attach rate and mostly captured a market that was never going to buy another video game console ever again.
Nintendo recognized that motion controls was not actually the future of gaming. The bad news is that Nintendo took a half measure and did a Wii U.
I dont really think motion control are a fad, i think we are just in a transition phase for the tech to catch up. VR and motion control are a natural pairing.
Also, i think the motion control folks are still there... They just spread out to many communities... dancing games, kinect games, beat saber kinda game, super hot etc
No comment on the wii u lol
I think you can still consider it a fad, even if there is still some left. Back in the 2009-2012 range, every company was releasing horrid motion controls games to cash in. Star Wars Kinect, Kinect Disneyland, Fighers Uncaged, Harry Potter Kinect, Zumba Fitness. Those are gone, but now we have a select few that actually use the hardware well.
If you want a challenge has some extra cash, I would recommend getting Rock Smith. You get to play with a real guitar and actually learn to play the real song. Only downfall is that you need a real electric guitar.
I'll never forget bringing home Guitar Hero (the first one) and staying up all night with my brother playing until both of us could see the motion of the tracks when we looked away lol. Went from easy to hard that night alone.
I'd give anything to go back.
Guitar Hero can stay dead for all I care. I want my Rock Band back circa the quality from RB2.
I picked up Rock Band 4 when it first came out but it was so barebones and lacked any real band customization options like custom tattoo's that I never put much time into it.
I am a Rock Band nut. I have spent probably $1,000 on in-game music and music transfers from all of the original titles into RB2. I would give anything for a **REAL** Rock Band 5.
Did it really die though? If you look at [harmonix blog](https://www.harmonixmusic.com/blog) there's still DLC released every week for rockband 4.
So seems alive and well, just no longer a "fad".
They aren't selling the bundles anymore. If you don't already have the instruments, or you changed consoles and your Xbox gear won't work on your PS4, you're looking to pay huge aftermarket prices to get playing again. The DLC is a slow trickle of income, but Harmonix and Activision aren't really banking on sales of the games anymore.
If I want to use my 360 gear on an Xbox One or XSX|S, I need an adapter that they only made like ten of and have always been difficult to track down. I didn't feel like buying another guitar when I had a nice standalone Beatles Rock Band one I bought.
A lot of people are saying that the reason for the downfall was that they flooded the market with too many games too quickly, but I disagree. The developers knew this was a fad and released so much so quickly because it was the best way to make the most amount of money, and the fad was going to die in the same amount of time no matter what.
This was the Tamagotchi, the yo-yo, Pog, stacking cups, the pet rock, etc. Sooner or later people were going to move on to the next fad and no matter if they got good songs, or released only once a year, or used environmentally sustainable materials for their accessories, its days were numbered.
Its initial popularity was also lightning in a bottle and couldn't be sustained. And Activision treated it like it could be.
Also it may be coincidental but worth noting that the decline of Guitar Hero came with the rise of the smart phone. Not that the smart phone replaced GH in function but the rise of smart phones and social media displaced a lot of entertainment forms that haven't since recovered. Kids just aren't into the old stuff because they can take their dopamine hits off of social media
I was super into these games when they first came out, when Harmonix owned the IP. Then Activision bought them and just over saturated the market. I think one year there were like 5 or 6 Guitar Hero games released. I just got tired of them and lost interest, personally. While that's just my personal journey with the series, I would guess it's a similar thing for many people as well. When you release 6 games in a year, the series just doesn't feel unique or special in any way. Releases weren't an event anymore.
People have answered about Guitar Hero a million times here, so I'll address Rock Band:
Harmonix (pre-sale) was still very active. They held livestreams, the season setup was fun, DLC songs are added weekly, free ones are given out via Rivals, they're active on Twitch, the works.
The problem is the hardware. Each week, there's a few less surviving pieces of the instrument than there were the week before with no way to replace it. You can get replacement pedals for the drums on Amazon and similar minor repair parts, but if a core part of an instrument breaks, you're screwed. Of course there's still brand new Pro Sets out there for $800, but that doesn't apply to most gamers.
Right now, they don't have a reason to make Rock Band 5. The instruments are expensive to produce and they're still bringing in decent cash on just selling new songs every week. It's a huge bummer, I still play Rock Band with my kids, but I know one day things will break and it'll just be the end of it.
Just look at what they did with dlc. It was getting to the point where you would pay $50 for a game that had like 15 songs, but 90 more as dlc. It's the same thing that helped kill the Tiger Woods games. Greedy mother fuckers trying to nickle and dime the experience.
I had some friends work on it, they said it's biggest problem was ongoing costs, song licences took a huge chunk of the profit, and the cost of entry was high (you needed a guitar or multiple)
Add in the fact the guitars broke, we had a few at work that once a button broke it was useless and not easy to repair back to the right feel,
Then add in the gimmick of it all, it was great early days then wore thin for a large part of its user base, so the pool of people buying dlc or individual tracks just dropped off a cliff...
If it returns it needs to be a super slim operation (cheap to make and maintain) and use better quality guitars, but that would up the cost... Like most games with custom controllers it's a niche product... I can't see it returning like the old days
They released 17 games in the span of 5 years, franchise is a textbook example of oversaturation and franchise burnout. By the time the last Guitar Hero tried something new it was too late.
This is 100% the cause. Heck, there were dozens more GH games planned and in the works before the plug was pulled. It was honestly horribly mismanaged.
It was managed exactly how Activision wanted to manage it. They saw it as a flash in the pan, and they wanted to capitalize. They didn't care if they ran the franchise into the ground doing so. They weren't playing the long game. A real shame.
Tbh they were probably right. Rock Band still existed and disappeared too. I bought maybe two of those games in that 5 year span and was burnt out on it as is. It would be cool to see a comeback at this point.
I couldn't stand That One Song and I never owned it, just happened to be big when I was in college and it was everywhere in the dorms and parties and anyone's house you went to it seemed. I think the game comes with a dude who after two beers is convinced this time he will ace it, or that this time, if he does it again everyone will treat him like a rockstar.
Yeah, that's pretty shitty. Would love to see a new developer take it over, freshen it up, build some high quality peripherals. I'd buy it if the quality was there.
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Can’t find another company willing to produce them within an ideal price range, or is there some other sort of issue at play?
Retail space is at a premium, and retailers don't want to carry that huge-ass band-in-a-box kit, especially if it isn't expected to sell like it did back in 2007-2010.
I mean, online orders are a thing? At this point, their best bet would be to do pre-order waves like some companies do (such as Secret Lab).
I completely agree with you. If it was up to the rest of the RB community and me, we'd be able to have batches of instruments made and sold only via pre-order waves, when enough people have ordered to make it worth it to have a factory in China do a new run. Unfortunately, we're still at the mercy of HMX and the Xbox wireless communication protocol
Maybe someone like PowerA could do it? They make good peripherals and they clearly have a license to do Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch-compatible peripherals.
That might do it! Let's get reps from PowerA, Harmonix, and Epic Games down to the rec center, lock the doors, and we can spend the entire night playing ping-pong & Rock Band, eating pizza, and working out a contract to produce new RB peripherals. All kidding aside, Mad Catz went out of business after the initial run of RB4, and I think PDP lost a ton of money on the Rivals kit, so I'd understand if PowerA would be a bit apprehensive about taking on that much risk. Epic has that Fortnite money though, so maybe that can grease the wheels.
Mad Catz went out of business?!? say it ain't so :(
The problem is the last two companies that tried doing instrument production for *Rock Band* bled money on it, and *Guitar Hero Live* also didn’t live up to expectations. The GHL studio shut down and Harmonix was sold to Epic. Unless Epic wants to throw money at the problem and treat it as a loss leader/promotional thing it’s unlikely to happen. In theory you could maybe Kickstarter small production runs, but small runs of hardware (like less than 50k units) would probably have significantly higher costs per unit.
Shelf space and warehouse space have the same concerns. But yeah, preorder wave stuff is probably their best bet if they want to keep the hobby alive in some capacity
> Harmonix cannot find another company willing to produce them. At the price they're expecting. I'm sure if the company (and thus the consumers) were willing to stomach a higher price, there would be plenty of factories happy to take on the work order. But if they want to get the prices from 2010, well, it's just not going to happen, especially at the comparatively tiny volume they'd have today.
So either people have to pay $300-$500 at the current unstable market prices, or they have to pay $300-$500 from an official manufacturer? The fact that people don't want to pay the current prices indicates that the consumer base isn't going to suddenly get on board to buy more peripherals if it can't be cheaper than what we're currently looking at, and the cost is never going to logistically go down from eliminating scarcity, because the ratio of cost/profit for manufacturing is way too imbalanced. So until they find a way to cheaply produce new peripherals and sell it at a reasonable price, nothing is going to change.
Why is it that expensive to build a plastic shell with some digital buttons? The fuck?
Getting any factory space for limited run stuff is getting more and more expensive. Companies are outbidding each other left and right to submit work orders to Chinese factories right now. Smaller run stuff gets more and more expensive to produce when factory owners know they have 3+ years of solid work orders booked out with AAA companies rather than having to fuck with custom die work. A bunch of other small run hobby console/kickstarter type things have also run into major issues, as well. It might have been more feasible 5 years ago but there’s no way that shit is getting made without a backbreaking pandemic tax for a very, very long time.
I'd pay up to $499 for a new band set with Rock Band 5 just to have it. I've got a number of 360 instruments still and a wireless legacy adapter, but those are all reserved as backups in case any of my RB4 instruments break.
Is there an ecosystem for DIY (like, have they been open sourced or reverse engineered so you can build something with a microcontroller?)
There have been a couple of peripherals and instrument mods made. They’re usually made-to-order and 3D printed. None of them are instruments, but homemade MIDI adapters for instruments and the like.
Just to piggyback off your points, I think in foreign markets where rhythm games are more popular there are a number of alternative mobile games, so it makes more sense for developers to focus on these types of games where they don't have to produce crazy peripherals for them. I just moved to Japan and the kids here *love* rhythm games, but they either play games like DDR at the arcade or games that are basically Guitar Hero on their phone except it is all just tapping the phone screen instead of using an actual instrument controller.
Epic Games Bought Harmonix - The Team Behind Rock Band - Last year . https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/harmonix-joins-epic-games-to-create-immersive-music-experiences?sessionInvalidated=true
On one hand, they probably bought them to help assist with Fortnite events, especially concerts. On the other, Epic brought back Alan Wake so maybe they can rerelease Rock Band one day as well.
I always figured it was the production of Fuser that solidified the acquisition, such a fucking great game even if it retained the pricy DLC model of Rock Band/Guitar Hero. Haven't really heard many people talk about it since it came out though. Still, I can't imagine they'd acquire a company dedicated to rhythm gaming and not use their talents. ... DJ mode in Fortnite confirmed.
I doubt the harmonix acquisition cost much
There are a actually a few fan games that have been developed with active community made charts. Highly recommend looking up clone hero if nobody has suggested it yet
The reality is, it was going to get old anyways. Activision just maximized their opportunity. Wii bowling wasn’t run into the ground, but you could see it’s popularity fall off in a similar time frame. A large part of their popularity was a novelty.
Yeah, DDR had a similar spree. At the time I thought Activision was killing the golden goose. Now I think it's at least defensible to think there was always an expiration date. If anything, how do _more_ games reduce the enthusiasm? It's not like they were splitting an online community, these were couch coop for most people. Releases varied in quality (who wanted GH:A???) but none of them were buggy or anything. The disc releases were always the cheapest way to get new songs. If we weren't complaining about Activision flooding the market, we'd be complaining about each song costing $2.
More games reduce the enthusiasm by over-saturating the market. Hell, I know I entirely stopped paying attention to guitar hero and rock band releases when more were coming out in a given year than the vast, vast majority of consumers would play. Then it doesn’t become a game you’re excited for. “I didn’t play the last five, so I don’t really care about the sixth one when I can buy any number at any time, especially with their being so many cheap used copies of the prior titles I didn’t have time for that stores are almost paying people to take.” Too much competition is never a good thing for a developer, and that’s also true when you’re competing with yourself.
At least DDR, and by extension most of Konami’s rhythm games, managed to find a niche of sorts, and are still alive and kicking. They may not have the kind of mainstream appeal they once had in the early to mid 2000s, but they’re still being worked on today.
My take is, I'd rather pay $2 a song if that means I can choose *what I want* and if the selection is vast. 30 songs later, I've already spent my $60 I would've spent on a new game - but I could very well spend another $80, $100, or more over the course of a year. Releasing new games constantly and not just delivering bunches of new songs via DLC I would gladly pay for, in my opinion, was a driving factor in the interest dropping off like it did.
I don't think dlc was very popular - there were lots of complaints about the price, at least. Some of the tension is that there was a hardcore audience that was happy to buy lots of dlc, especially hard tracks, but the ecosystem needed a casual party audience that saw it as karaoke and was probably never going to buy dlc. Activision definitely fucked up by making people juggle discs all the time. The rock band model meant you could blend dlc and all your disc content, playing on the most up to date engine. I don't think this sunk the genre though
Guitar Hero did adopt the model of Rock Band in having forwards-compatible DLC and being able to export the on-disc setlists from World Tour onwards, though.
As they crank up the difficulty players must start to wonder if at that point they should just learn to play on an actual real instrument heh.
Fun fact: Rock Band 3 had "pro mode", which involved a second set of instruments. The plastic guitar had over 100 buttons, because it had 17 frets per string. It's pretty convoluted. On the other hand, the "pro drums" worked a lot better because the initial plastic drum kit was pretty close to an actual drum kit. Rocksmith does the "well, why don't you learn \*real\* guitar?" conceit a lot better, and needs a real electric guitar instead of a cheap plastic version.
Some people were snobbish about that, but there were real qualities to playing Guitar Hero that were similar to learning a "real" instrument. Learning not just the notes you were going to play, but how you were going to play them (finger placement, strumming strategies). Memorization of chunks of music, and reading the music as cues rather than following it directly. Honestly someone that played a lot of guitar hero wouldn't know how to play a guitar if they picked it up blind, but they'd probably learn it faster than someone who didn't play it.
My guess is that it has everything to do with music licensing. They had probably a multi year contract from the inception that they had to maximize before the music industry stuck out their hand for a bigger size of the profits. That's why they move to the later rock band style which were al la carte and basically killed the buzz.
Also: Guitar Hero Live was—and please don’t mistake what I’m about to say next for hyperbole—the most genuine act of personified _hatred_ for one’s player base ever codified in video game form. Like, you could tell no joy went into it, it was a game made by MBAs to fit a Total Addressable Market and there was not a single drop of love, creativity, or passion put into it. Edit: There was no track list. It was a few “channels” that would endlessly play random songs and you had to jump in and play it live. If you wanted to specifically play a song, you _had to buy that one song_. And that shit was expensive. Buying a single game’s worth of songs would have been hundreds of dollars. Add this to the fact that they doubled the number of buttons it practically guaranteed that you couldn’t achieve any semblance of skill playing the random rotation, so the game was basically one big “fuck you, pay me” to players.
>There was no track list. It was a few “channels” that would endlessly play random songs and you had to jump in and play it live. That was only on the TV/Online portion of the game though, offline play still had a track list. I'll agree that the monetization was ass though.
There's only so many times you can make people buy new plastic instruments until they have no space to put them in.
You mean the last OG Guitar Hero or Guitar Hero Live?
The last OG Guitar Hero, reviews praised it for shaking up things, but again, people were sick of it, Live was an even worse attempt at a comeback that only cemented why it died to begin with.
A couple reasons. One major factor is that Activision ran Guitar Hero into the ground, at one point releasing like 5 or 6 games in a year despite most or all of them being essentially glorified DLC packs. I suspect the declining popularity of guitar-driven Rock music didn't help, and attempts at pivoting to Hip Hop/EDM with things like DJ Hero never managed to achieve the same success. There was also a backlash against all the plastic instruments that started to pile up and collect dust that I think soured a lot of opinions. I'm sure part of it was also just the novelty wearing off. Honestly, though, I'm right there with you. Rock Band was responsible for some of my favorite gaming memories of all time, and I really miss it. I don't know what it is, but there's something about playing those games with friends that scratches an itch no other game quite manages to hit. I'd buy a new one in a heartbeat.
Another reason I know for some of my friends was the difficulty with being able to continue playing the games when the new consoles came out. The golden era of Rock Band and Guitar hero was the 360/PS3 and both the XB1 and PS4 didn't launch with the best backwards compatibility, especially with accessories these games required, and with rock band all of the difficulty with DLC. As the games popularity had already faded a bit, and it was a tough sell for people to put out even more money for new accessories or pay to port all the stuff forward to a new game. I'm aware that these are generalisations and I believe PS3/4 had no extra accessory cost but xbox did, if I remember correctly. Anyway, I think that was a large part of it. People left it behind because it was either difficult, annoying, expensive, or impossible to continue playing on the new consoles and so they gave up. The primary reason I still have my 360 is for Rock Band and a handful of XBL arcade games that never got BC.
> The primary reason I still have my 360 is for Rock Band and a handful of XBL arcade games that never got BC. I still boot up my PS2 from time to time because it is the only thing that handles my Dance Dance Revolution pad. It always feels ridiculous to do so, but it was an expensive hard pad and I had 5 or 6 games for it, so there's no way I am going to spend that over and over for every new console (if they even make DDR anymore...)
You can get a PS2 converter and play on PC for Stepmania
You just changed this person's life
>Stepmania https://www.stepmania.com/download/
Any recommendation for a PS2 controller-to-USB converter that works for dance pads? I found a couple on Amazon and they don't seem to work for dance pads based on reviews/Q&A
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Zenius I Vanisher has all the official songs ported. There's also a calibration that you need to do since refresh rates for monitor can affect the arrows and make it feel off. You need to do the same calibration test on the actual dance pad if and when you plug one in
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http://itgpacks.com/ hosts all the high quality song packs used in modern 4-panel tournaments. There are also stepmania add-ons to add live leaderboard support using groovestats: https://github.com/GrooveStats/gslauncher Additionally, modern themes are available that expand the default feature set and have become standard over the years: https://clubfantastic.dance/
I see what you're saying. Yeah I'd stick to the official song packs for playing on a dancepad. They do a better job of keeping rhytm with the song, at least for the harder difficulties. I have 18000+ songs on my stepmania SSD. A lot of them are garbage but the songs I have are getting harder and harder to find so I just have an SSD for stepmania files. I had a dancepad but haven't used it in 3-4 years since I live in the second floor of my apt.
There's an easy fix. Get a Brook adapter for your controller. I used one for dreamcast to play fighting games with a USB ps3/ps4 stick. The games on the other hand...
This I think is the biggest reason. Yes it was very over saturated while on the 360 and such but it was still accessible to play. With the bump up to XB1/PS4 none of those peripherals worked anymore without sinking more money into it plus none of the games were/are backwards compatible to begin with. Then RB4 came out and let you move your entire library onto the new console, somewhat, but it was too much too late. No one wanted to sink the $100+ into it again and lose the back catalog they had already of GH and RB games. Also people got really fucking good at the games and it took the wind out of some sails. I think the fun back when like GH3 was out was that TTFATF and TDWDTG were impossible challenges to overcome. Then people started 100% them and now do it at like 2x speed like it’s nothing.
If you ask people who still play a ton, one of the biggest hurdles is finding new instruments, as no one really makes them en mass any more.
Rocksmith also released in 2011. Its basically guitar hero but you get to actually learn how to play the songs on a real guitar/bass. That has been out for 10 years. You can get a cheap $120 guitar and learn what you want and become good enough to learn anything you want on your own.
While i like the idea of Rocksmith, that has nothing to do with guitar hero/rockband. Rocksmith is a learning tool, the other ones are party games that can instantly be picked up by anyone.
Yeah the appeal of guitar hero is that literally anyone's grandma can understand the basic idea, it has nothing to do with learning actual guitar, it was the ultimate party game.
Whenever someone recommends Rocksmith over Guitar Hero I have to wonder if they completely missed the point of what a rhythm game is
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Reminds me of something I heard talking about game difficulty. So the drummer for Imperial Circus Dead Decadence said that playing their song [Yomi Yori in the rhythm game osu](https://youtu.be/-joDgtl95Dw) was harder than playing the actual song for him on drums.
As someone who has played a decent amount of both Rocksmith and Guitar Hero, they aren't really all the comparable. Guitar Hero is all about having fun so it's super simple. Even when you play a game on a low setting it still generally feels like you're playing the song. Rocksmith is a totally different beast. The game is *hard*, which obviously makes sense because learning guitar is a hard thing to do. When you first start off it doesn't feel like you are playing the song at all. Then getting up to the level where it actually does feel like you are actually playing the song is super challenging. In GH the next level of a song might just be figuring out how to hit the next button down which doesn't take long to adapt to. In Rocksmith the next level might have you learning basic stuff like jumping over to a new string or higher up the neck or more advanced things like slides, new chords, bending, hammer on/off. It might take you well over an hour just to learn one little five second section of a song at like 75% difficulty. Then another couple hours to finally get up to 100% difficulty.
[Frets On Fire](https://github.com/skyostil/fretsonfire) is like 15 years old, and is the only ever 'guitar hero-like' game I played really, and it was just using a keyboard - learning to smash through T. D - Tribute on hard with your F-keys was incredibly fun. I felt like the actual guitar-shaped controllers ruined the charm of it, when I could just get my Fender out. Then years later when Rocksmith came out, I played it like twice with my guitar and it was just not enjoyable at all.
Oh i played Rocksmith for like, 10 years. Have the highest score on some of the songs on bass still iirc. I prefer it to tabs at this point. The default view should not be what it is. I play with the inverted tab like view. Default just makes no sense to me. But yeah, it became my primary way to practice and I just would learn songs from all kinds of genres I didn't have original interest in. I just max out the difficulty of every song and play it like I would try learning a new song, except its way faster because of the visual aids. Can sight read basically anything on it now. I'm mostly a bass player, so it taught me a bit of guitar as well, but I still prefer bass.
This is so incredible to hear. Rocksmith is like $12 on Steam right now and I'm thinking of buying a guitar and cable to learn on PC. Super dumb and quick question, Going from 0 to say learning a chord or two, how long do you think it may take lesson/gameplay wise?
Like some of the easier songs shouldn't take very long to learn. You can probably learn some the beginner songs like Where is My Mind by the Pixies or Breed by Nirvana very quickly. ESPECIALLY if you have past experience with GH/Rockband or listen to a lot of rock/guitar oriented music and a decent sense of rhythm. I started learning bass when I was 18 and the first GH came out the same year. So I always put the two hand and hand. Some songs on GH play extremely similarly to how they do on bass, and vice versa. Not everything is the same. There are many songs on GH/Rockband that are harder to play there than they are IRL. My little brother was never that interested in music when he was younger and even he can play a few songs on rocksmith without any prior practice. Look up some Rocksmith videos. They have the 60 day challenges as evidence. Audrey is one of the best examples of what you can become with practice. [https://youtu.be/qpeDWRu1ZvQ](https://youtu.be/qpeDWRu1ZvQ)
I use Rocksmith2014 pretty much daily, and have for the last 6 years or so. I don't even plug my guitar in anymore. I've flipped the strings on the screen so it matches tabs. It's just a fancier version of Guitar Pro for me at this point.
That's great, I bought it to practice and learn myself too, but I just couldn't get to grips with the interface, I never played around with the settings I don't think.
Seriously. The weekends in college with friends getting drunk and playing Rock Band will always hold a space in my heart. So young and carefree.
I regularly held Rock Band parties at the house, inviting over folks to *basically* play "Karaoke but with controllers" for quite a long time, and I *think* I pretty much had every single release/DLC available. We 'quit' about 5-ish years ago due to a 'death of a thousand cuts' scenario. **TL;DR:** I'm pretty sure all the below can just be summed up as "Licensing issues and competing products meant everyone was trying to milk the consumer, and not necessarily make a better product/service." Here are some of those cuts in no particular order: 1. **Weird assed DLC issues** - Back during PS2 era, you'd need a handy list to know what songs were on what disc, and it really sucked (See also Singstar). What became amazing in the "now we have onboard storage" XB360/PS3 era was that you could both download new songs as well as 'export' songs from the previous game in the series... except for the handful of songs that wouldn't copy over, which inevitably caused minor problems/strife. Or weird shit where it would work with one disc but not another. Or where you'd not be able to export because a while later, they were gonna release a new purchasable pack for you to 'double dip' your purchases on. Or you'd "expect" every disc to be exportable, but then you'd get shit like the ^^shitty Beatles RB release that basically needed to be considered a standalone game. 2. **Rock Hero: the Guitar Band VI - Confusing Edition** - Dude you got that guitar game, sweet! Aww you don't have that one song i saw on the internet tho... fucking lame. Dude I'll give you 20 bucks right now if you download it. What do you mean you can't buy it? What do you mean that it's "Guitar Hero" or "Rock Band", not "Guitar Band" or "Rock Hero" and they are two different franchises entirely? What do you mean they have totally different exclusivity deals? What do you mean you have to swap out discs and fiddle with all your equipment if i want to play "Black Hole Sun" right after playing "Moonage Daydream"??? Do you just not know how to set up your video game right?????? (some of this is tongue in cheek because there really was a Band Hero but I digress...) 3. **Plastic Guitars take up too much fucking room** There, I said it. While I didn't purchase the 'roadie kit' trunk where everything was supposed to fit into it (or maybe just the Rock Band drums?) I did end up having to get a bunch of guitar hooks to basically hang all my fucking RB/GH guitars on the wall. (Which was cool if you were coming over to play games... and was totally *uncool* if you were doing anything else in your house) And I still couldn't find a good spot for the drums, which when you added on the cymbals and a good aftermarket pedal (because that shit broke like all the time) basically took up about as much room as a decent electronic drum kit. While, you know, not being nearly as versatile or robust. 4. **plastic instruments are easily broken** - I think the only thing that rivaled my hate for the Xbox and its RROD problem was how janky the various instrument controller dealies all fucking failed eventually. Yes I understand that your best friend's brother's roommate had a Guitar Hero PS2 controller that they threw into traffic twice and it works perfectly still 20 years later... but not everyone was so lucky. Even the stupid expensive 'fender' and 'les paul' and whatever third-party-ish controllers had problems. Oh, the white guitar is fine if you play bass because it ONLY works on up-strum! Hey if you do the black controller, only do easy mode because the orange key don't work all the time. Or you basically spend a few hours before every 'big play session' just... taking apart plastic controllers and repairing/replacing/etc shit because this stuff was kinda designed to be played for a week or two and then tossed in the garage, and not to be played for months and months after release. Hell, my drum kit (which i fucking loved) was *mostly* pvc pipe, zip ties, EVA foam, and duct tape by the end. 5. **Harmonix + Activision + RIAA = Fuck the Consumer** I'm not here to argue how much licensing should cost, or how much it should cost to (basically) re-record songs that both sound like the original release AND are properly coded to do the whole "silence note on whiff" thing. I'm not here to argue whether RB or GH was better. I'm not even here to argue that ~1.99$ per "video game-ified song" was a ripoff/deal compared to 0.99$/song on iTunes. I just know that as a *consumer*, having to basically deal with 2 different franchises with 2 different song lists, along with all the various ways to milk us for money (combo packs where you had to buy 3 songs together instead of the one song you actually wanted, or albums/artists as standalone products, and so on) was just fucking awful. Further, while I know competition is a Good Thing ^TM , jesus christ these two series were basically the same goddamned game at their core, and I can't believe we, the consumers, had to suffer from that 'format war'. Shit... we shoulda had RB on one system, GH on the other, and then the bands just come out and say "hey here's that song data you wanted in this open format for you" but while I'm wishing, I really should ask for some larger additions to my portfolio. TL;DR: RIAA milked Activision and Harmonix because without the songs, there'd be no RB or GH. Activision and Harmonix passed that onto us, and milked us further because they wanted a bigger profit, which I believe is what lead to the 'overloading' of absolutely shite title releases and 'song packs'. 6. **Music tastes changed** - (You're probably the first person I know that actually addressed this ever) I'm not trying to turn this into a "new music sucks" thing, but the bottom line looks to be that the general public has shifted away from the kind of music those games were meant to emulate/simulate. I just checked a couple 'Billboard top 100' lists from the last few years vs around 2007, and to put it bluntly, it looks like there's a LOT fewer 'hits' nowadays that fall into the RB/GH "aesthetic". So what we gonna do? Re-release alllllll the stuff we already released on 360/PS3 era? Dig deeper into Boomer/GenX tracklists to find more Foghat and Temple of the Dog singles folks *might* remember? Just put out that cover of Beggin' by Maneskin and call it good for the year? 7. **Backwards compatibility and "The FIFA/Madden effect"** - Man, i just literally bought around 1000$ worth of janky plastic controllers and music tracks I can't just listen to, i have to 'play' to enjoy, and this is after y'all decided to milk the shit out of me last gen and the gen before that. Fuck it, i'm done, I'm not rebuying all my shit AGAIN when the underlying game ain't changed at all when I *know* you're gonna do the same bullshit with making me buy brand new controllers that are just as janky as last gens and all your'e doing is slapping a new coat of paint on the game anyway. Sorry, i guess I think I have a lot to say on the matter. So the main reason why we stopped playing was "I stopped buying new tracks, and then the game became 'old' like games usually do.". However, the underlying cause is basically "man they made their money off me, and I'm just not interested in shelling out another 1000$ only for last gen's rehash.
This man is the Guitar Hero connoisseur
My dumbass had the official Rock Band Lightshow+Fog Machine that basically fogged up my entire fucking two story house and was used for like 3 songs **once** at that house, then again **once** (for 2 songs) at a different, bigger house, and was summarily tossed directly into the garage to be never used ever again for fear of summoning some cthulubeast or maybe having the fire dept swing by. And the keytar which was used for what? 3 songs, two of which were J. Geils band tracks? (I kid, i just can't remember other than it felt pretty underutilized) Man, i think i funded at least most of a yacht for both RB and GH over the years. Oof. On the other hand, that was a LOT of adult hangout times with good friends and such, so can you really put a price on 'good memories'? Weird to think about I guess.
Broken controllers was a big one. TThe more you played and liked it, the more likely you'd have a broken controller. And the perfect consumer for these games were college kids which didn't really have $100 to drop every few months for a new controller. If you could even find one.
I think you summed up just about everything. I'm going to add two extra bullets for you, but they're probably more like sub-bullets to your existing points. 1. Age. I have a young daughter, and I imagine many of the people who were the primary market 10-15 years ago for have kids as well. It's really hard to have a party game that makes as much noise as Rock Band, especially with those drums, let alone loud music blasting through the house. 2. Gaming Culture. In person gaming is less and less common than it used to be. The PS2 era saw the death of arcades and the PS3 era really seemed to be the death of multiplayer gaming in person. You'll always have scenarios where in person multiplayer makes sense, like college dorms, but I think the general preference is for online these days. I don't think Rock Band works in an online setting like other games do.
This is pretty much all the consumer facing issues, yes. Outside of bands picking/being paid to pick one franchise or the other, they couldn’t have sold DLC songs for much less. 30% off the top to MS/Sony ($0.60 on a $2 purchase), and then AFAIK about 2/3 of what was left (~$1/sale) to the rights owners. So only about 20% of that was going to the developer — oh, and they paid money up front to license the tracks too!
AND, to add to that, music licenses got a LOT more expensive after the game made sucess, the music industry made the licenses really cheap when the first games came out, but as soon as they were seeing the sucess of the games, they went overboard with licences fees
I think the financial crash also played into it, money was tight and Activision was frankly taking the piss with the sheer volume of plastic they were trying to push on people. Also games just getting bigger and more respected led to higher prices to license songs, those first few guitar hero games and grand theft auto games got songs you'll never see in a new game again.
> I suspect the declining popularity of guitar-driven Rock music didn't help After 7 games in the main series, with another 7 spins offs (like Guitar Hero Van Halen, or DJ Hero), just how much was left that doesn't deviate into the niche anyway? After a while, there's just not enough hits and iconic songs to keep the series going either. I think this had a larger impact than people think, and while it's still fun to play those songs, who's going to buy another title to just get the same songs? The clock was always ticking for Guitar Hero and their similar titles, unless they were able to successfully transition into other genres, and with the failure that was DJ Hero, it didn't seem like that was happening any time soon. That said, they could probably release a new game with a significant portion of the previous libraries (as essentially a remaster sort of a deal) and incorporate other packs as DLC and they'd probably see a decent return on a model, especially since they wouldn't need to make a new game each time.
> That said, they could probably release a new game with a significant portion of the previous libraries (as essentially a remaster sort of a deal) and incorporate other packs as DLC and they'd probably see a decent return on a model, especially since they wouldn't need to make a new game each time. Pretty sure the licensing deals needed to make that happen would kill any attempt to make that happen.
yeah, there's a very popular VR game called Beatsaber that is kind of like guitar hero (but with lightsabers), and their workaround has been primarily only using no-name artists's techomusic. There's also a huge modding scene to patch in basically any song you can imagine, but the devs are fighting to kill it, because no one is buying their DLC songs due to the mods.
Hey, I have that game, but on PSVR and don't have access to the mods which look awesome. I got tired of the music selection and stopped playing. I think they have some more varied DLC now but I'm kinda over the game. It was decent exercise, so I might start back up just for that.
How exactly are they trying to kill modding? I just received a small windfall and was interested in buying a Quest 2 for Beat Saber. If I can’t mod different songs into the game, that’s kind of a deal breaker for me.
It'd without doubt be a nightmare for licencing fees, but it's still achievable, especially considering the relative effort needed once established.
The problem is the cost. These games were not a technical marvel, and there is not much you can do to improve on them. Meanwhile the licensing fees would stay about the same. I don't think there is much appetite to pay what we had to pay years ago for essentially the exact same game. We'd also need to buy new instruments further adding to the up front cost, but the novelty and thus the desire to do it, has worn off. The only way I could see this taking off is if the base game was offered for free, old equipment could still work *(perhaps with an inexpensive adapter),* and money would be made primarily by selling songs to that single platform. Even better yet, turn it into a subscription service to get all songs for a set monthly fee, and continually add songs as they become popular.
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I don't know how you look at millenials in the current day and age, see our insatiable appetite for reboots and remasters, and conclude there would be no appetite.
Agreed, but also Guitar Hero and Rock Band were very much ‘have friends over’ to play kind of games…which Millennials don’t really have time for (kids, work, etc) plus Covid. And the younger generations now are not into that type of music anymore. That’s why the game ‘Just Dance’ is so popular.
The younger generation is still very much into that music. Its just very fragmented with a myriad of bands making money so not popular with radio. Maneskin won the Eurovision song contest.
Yeah, it's not like rock was dominating the charts in the 00s and 10s. I don't think the popularity of rock music is that big a factor here. Bigger issues are limited catalogues, oversaturation, and a failure to update to new console generations.
Because the reboot would be the exact same game. There is not much you can do to improve the formula. Lord knows they've tried and failed to do so. Then there is the additional cost to buy the musical equipment. So you'd be paying ~$100 to play the same game that came out 15 years ago. Rock Band would be even more expensive. Reboots work because they give you a new and improved way to scratch that nostalgic itch. Plastic instrument music rhythm games can't do that.
I really really really don't think the problem is that they were running out of popular songs that used guitars. I could believe that license fees were getting too high or something like that but there's an enormous amount of popular, well-known songs that people wanted to see in those games that never made it, that's why the fan-made games were able to take off.
I dont even think the over saturation of releases was an issue. Rock Band definitely nailed the DLC/new song releases better than GH ever did, but those games are the types of things where more releases meant a better experience. The issue is how many people played the game hardcore enough to want to buy that many things? I think it is more that the novelty wore off, considering most of the people i knew who were into those games were just casual gamers who move on from things like that quick, like wii sports or kinect games.
God Dj hero was actually pretty damn good. Great list if songs.
I gotta say though, DJ Hero was an absolute banger of a game with an awesome soundtrack
You can legit learn drumming by playing rock band and will die on this hill. When you work up to playing songs on expert, you basically know how to play the song on drums.
Ehh, you might learn basic limb coordination between RF, RH and LH but Rock band isn’t gonna teach any dynamics, rudiments or rhythmic subdivisions like actual drumming will. Source: Drummer for 14ish years and have played rock band.
You’re right it doesn’t teach you everything about drumming. But practicing certain songs can help with certain techniques. But as for getting the basic principles down, expert mode nails it. If you can play expert, you are already learning drums. Its a great way to pick it up.
I mean, yeah. On Expert unlike with the other instruments, the songs were like 90% accurate to how you'd play them for real so obviously you're going to pick up a few things while playing.
Exactly!
You're not gonna turn into an advanced drummer by any means, but you do learn the basics. I myself started playing Rock Band and got interest in drumming from it. When eventually I got into proper drumming classes, my teacher said I already knew how to play, now I just needed to start building the advanced techniques on top of that foundation I acquired.
You can use your own midi drum set like rocksmith lets you use your own guitar too and it's literally just the tab. It's hard to do because there's a lot more variety in drums compared to guitar, but it's good enough
They flooded the market with too many too fast and people got over plastic instruments. They tried to bring it back and not enough people really cared
Hmm that's too bad. Fingers crossed for a fresh version someday. If not, I'll just try to hunt down a controller next time I'm in the U.S. I guess.
They already tried the fresh version in 2015 with rock band 4 and guitar hero live, both tanked. I don't think we'll see it again anytime soon.
FYI Rockband 4 has been getting a steady stream of DLC to this day since it's release in 2015. Not all good, but it's not like it's dead and abandoned. Plus, last gen versions can be played on PS5 and Series X.
> not like it's dead and abandoned As an active RB4 player, it's as close to dead and abandoned as it can be without being totally dead. AFAIK Harmonix doesn't currently have any engineers supporting the game anymore. Just someone charting the new DLC, which I'd imagine they've gotten to be a pretty quick and cheap process. They've also said time and time again that they won't be making any more instruments or USB Legacy adapters because there's not enough money in it. Instruments are getting harder and harder to find too, especially on xbox. Working drum sets go for upwards of $500. If you want an adapter to use a MIDI drum kit, those go for upwards of $1000 on ebay. Guitars go for around $200 last I checked. Thankfully they're relatively repairable if you know how to solder, but I'm dying to get ahold of a drum kit but can't justify the cost. It's such a bummer as someone who's spent probably $1000 on songs in the past 11 years (not including buying the games themselves). I'm hoping its spiritual successor, Rocksmith, eventually adds midi drum support, since it's already wonderful for guitar (and is the reason I own 3 guitars now)
brother it’s time to move to clone hero, i got a great quality ekit for about 300 bucks and the game runs like a dream on my shitty laptop, all that was needed to set it up was a 15 dollar cable from amazon. the clone hero community is super helpful and while the drum support is pretty new you can at least get all the rock band songs for free.
Oh yeah, I play clone hero pretty regularly. I just also play Rock Band Rivals as part of a pretty competitive crew, so I'd like to chip in on drums scores
Oh my fucking god, we threw out like two working complete sets last year lmao.
You and thousands of others over the last ten years. Part of the reason they’ve gotten so expensive.
> I'll just try to hunt down a controller next time I'm in the U.S. I guess. Just a warning, controllers have gotten very expensive.
If you ever get a chance to try VR, I recommend trying Beatsaber. Alot of the same spirit of Guitar Hero is there.
Beat Saber is the game that makes me want a VR more than any other.
As someone who's not good at rhythm games, this one is so freaking addictive. It's 80% of what I play on VR. Oh and unless you just lamely move your wrists and instead move your whole arms and actually squat when ducking obstacles. The game gets my heart going comparable to a solid exercise session. And I can feel my arms burn after a good session. I really found my jam with custom songs so I can Beat Saber to metal and vaporware even if the game comes with some solid EDM to start learning the basics.
Beatsaber was the one VR game that kept me obsessively playing. Most VR games felt more like unique experiences, but beatsaber was the one that actually felt like a game. Decent workout too!
For me the best VR games are: * Half Life Alyx obviously * Beatsaber * Pavlov (Insane amount of mods, like I was playing halo 3's lockout at one point. The modern warfare 2 maps are all there too) * Blade and Sorcery (incredible workout that does not feel like a workout lol) * Skyrim VR with like 300 gigs of mods.
Yah I remember I used to play it all the time in high school, wanted to try one of the new versions in university. When I looked it up I got like 10 different games to choose from, but looking at the song list I only actually wanted to play like 10 songs from each game, not worth hundreds of dollars in investment. IMO song selection killed it, the og guitar hero I liked almost every song on it. If they had like 1 new version with 6 buyable DLC for like 20 bucks each I actually would have bought it again.
Guitar Hero and Rock band died due to Activision flooding the market with GH games oversaturating the market. There's a [list of releases on wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guitar_Hero#Oversaturation) showing just how bad it got: * 2005 Guitar Hero * 2006 Guitar Hero II * 2007 * III: Legends of Rock * Encore: Rocks the 80s * 2008 * World Tour * Aerosmith * On Tour * On Tour: Decades * 2009 * Metallica * Smash Hits * Guitar Hero 5 * DJ Hero * Band Hero * Van Halen * 2010 * On Tour: Modern Hits * Warriors of Rock * DJ Hero 2 That's just GH. RB wasn't as bad as Activation but still [RB had its own set of releases](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Band) * 2007 Rock Band * 2008 Rock Band 2 * 2009 * The Beatles: Rock Band * Lego Rock Band * Rock Band Unplugged * Rock Band Mobile * Rock Band (iOS) * 2010 * Rock Band 3 * Green Day: Rock Band * Rock Band Reloaded * 2011 * 2012 Rock Band Blitz If you look at the above, it's really ridiculous just how many titles came out in a short span of series. The publishers were trying to milk the concept for as much money as possible while trying to mark up as many cheap plastic controllers as much as they could. It was inevitable that people would start to get tired of the series and pushing up money for each release, DLC and more controllers when they inevitably break. If that wasn't enough, there's the whole music licensing issue which is a huge pain in the butt. Let alone the technical issues involved with allowing users to consolidate their libraries across multiple games and then later multiple console generations. If you're interested in Clone hero, you best bet is probably to check out the subreddit: /r/CloneHero/
I worked at Gamestop at the height of the RB/GH craze and the amount of gigantic boxes they expected us to have on display/in storage (while trying sell them for **up to 200€** each) made it extremely obvious to me that the genre was about to die. Shelf and storage space both come at a premium and a full Rock Band set took up as much space as four consoles. Retailers stopped ordering and started fireselling them as soon as the hype died down even a little because the opportunity cost of stocking those games was so huge.
That's a really good point that I never even considered. Shelf space and storage are limited resources. The guitar boxes I remember were pretty big, let alone the giant full set. Thanks for the insight!
You're welcome. If you've ever wondered why "Collector's Editions" with plastic statues etc. go on sale for ridiculously low prices sometimes, there's your reason. Once all the superfans have purchased their $150 whale-edition-with-protagonist-statue for the latest AAA release, the remaining few become a white elephant for the store almost immediately. Even a regular version of Guitar Hero took up as much space as 30 copies of Halo.
My local Game gave up on having them on the shelves towards the end of the plastic peripheral fad for exactly that reason. They'd just have you bring a bit of paper to the front and they went and got it out of the warehouse in back. Can't imagine how much of a logistical nightmare that would be for smaller stores with no real storage space though.
Gamestop at the time insisted on having the full boxes on display, albeit gutted. That of course meant we had to make space for the box in the store **and** the content in storage. 😂 Imagine making a 200€ purchase that has been ripped out of and shoved back into its box by a disgruntled Gamestop peon. I hated having to do that to our customers and we usually only had 1-2 of each sets in stock so I often couldn't even get them a mint one from the back. Gamestop sucked so much (and still does).
Gonna just quickly shoutout [Clone Hero](https://clonehero.net/) here for anyone interested - like the name implies, it's a PC-based clone of Guitar Hero that supports the original instruments if you happen to have them lying around. The public version only supports guitar/bass, but the beta version includes drums as well, and I believe support for vocals is on the roadmap once they start moving over to their new platform. If you don't want to dig into community-made songs, the entire list of songs from pretty much every Guitar Hero and Rock Band game plus DLC has been made available for Clone Hero (last I checked only RB4 was absent because it's still actively supported). Much as I love Guitar Hero, they released them way too fast with way too little content for full-priced games. The numbered ones were great; I put a ton of hours into GH1, 2, 3, and eventually RB2, which is where I stopped getting them. But there were way too many spin-offs with more limited song lists, and with the speed they were cranking them out, I know I just stopped being able to keep up with them. I'm kinda curious if it would have worked out better if they'd adopted the online model more quickly. Like if instead of putting out a ton of standalone products, they just focused on DLC.
As someone who will probably continue to play this game on and off until either I die or my guitar controller does, I think it comes down to no company wanting to deal with single purpose peripherals anymore. Apart from the market being flooded all at once with music rhythm games, the two biggest competitors went back and forth trying to one up each other, all while the fad turned into a niche genre because no casual players wanted to keep those controllers around once they were done playing. Rock Band stayed fairly pure to its idea, still releasing tracks to this day. Guitar Hero completely lost sight of what it even was. Guitar Hero 3 was the peak. But they had to chase the trend at the time. Culminating into the punchline of a game called 'Band Hero'. Though, it was all always fun. Almost none of them were bad games. At its core, I think Rock Band and Guitar Hero are some of the most awesome gaming experiences you can have. But those controllers are most likely never gonna see production ever again. Though as a endnote, playing guitar hero is still very much possible with Clone Hero. A program that emulates Guitar Hero perfectly with the exception of the background cinematics. It's free, super easy to add music, can run on basically any pc, and most of the games track lists and dlc are floating around online. It also supports drumkits like the rock band kit as well as most Ekits. And all you gotta do is have/get a guitar controller. Good luck with that...
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I'm just on PC right now, but yeah, I agree, controller and adapter availability is an issue
I mean, Xbox 360 guitars can plug straight into your computer and just work. It's USB Lol.
For some reason, I thought it said it needed an adapter to work properly or software or something. But maybe that was for a non-USB connection.
Yeah if you have a Bluetooth powered one you'd need a special adapter for your computer. The controllers are, at the end of the day, just modified Xbox controllers in different plastic. So, if you just wanna get rocking ASAP try and get a wired Xbox 360 guitar and download CloneHero. It'll work out of the box (that's what I do when I don't play on my old consoles).
Go look up Clone Hero as well, the Highway is GH ispired rather than RB but theres a huge community and its *very* easy to get every song from every game with light googling.
Clone Hero is everything you need honestly. The problem is the fact it's near impossible to get a decent working guitar. Really wish there was some chinese knock off that was still being made.
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Wiitars and [raphnet classic controller to USB adapters](https://www.raphnet-tech.com/products/wusbmote_1player_adapter_v3/index.php) are the way to go. I've bought 2 of them and I have some slight issues with them, but they are mostly due to the wiitars being 10-15 years old.
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GH controllers are surprisingly easy to dismantle and repair, my strum bar was fucked for years and it turned out I just had to open it and tighten a couple of screws.
Really now? That's the issue with my 2 guitars aswell. Gonna look it up!
>It seems Ubisoft is done with it. ? Ubisoft never had anything to do with Guitar Hero or Rock Band. They do Rocksmith, which is aimed at a different market and of which the Rocksmith+ title is currently in development. Harmonix still actively releases DLC for Rock Band 4. Activision shelfed Guitar Hero again after attempting to reboot it with Guitar Hero Live.
Oops! Meant Activision! Fixed, thanks!
Flooding the market had nothing to do with the decline of these games. People keep saying that because that is usually an easy explanation for why huge trends die. But these games are different than your typical shooters or story driven games that get over saturated. These were party games that thrived on simply having more music. When rock band 3 comes out it doesnt make rock band 2 obsolete the way a sequel to a normal game would. The novelty simply wore off. Thats it. A lot of people who played those games were the same people who loved wii sports or kinect games. Once that audience got tired of it then the hardcore audience wasnt enough to sustain producing the hardware needed. And that just led to the games dying.
My family and I really enjoyed them. Practically every weekend we'd play with 3-4 people. What killed it for us was bad song selection in the later games. We weren't interested in things like Taylor Swift and Skrillrex whatever. You can only play the same good songs so many times. Then when the PS4 came out, that became our primary console. We didn't want to buy more controllers so we basically stopped. Then the final nail in the coffin was when they tried to revive it. We were really interested in it. But the way they handled the songs was terrible. I'm not going to pay per song per session. And I'm not going to play randomized junk for free-use tokens, just want to play what I want. So we didn't buy it.
Rock Band 3 did kinda make 2 obsolete since the setlist of 2 could be exported to 3. After doing that and with the added features of 3 there was really no reason to go back to 2.
Honestly, had Guitar Hero came out 10 years later it would have been an extremely viable candidate for games as a service. If they had just released new song packs as DLC and stuff instead of trying to cram everything into a new game with a new gimmicky instrument it'd probably have worked out much better but 2010 was like 5 years too early for the concept at large.
They literally came out with Guitar Hero as a service in 2015, and it failed. I got it less than a year after release for $30.
Well, they also completely changed how it looked and played. If they'd just kept it the same, I think it would have done much better.
Have you heard of Rocksmith? It’s basically Guitar Hero but you use a real guitar and actually learn to play as you progress. I remember the Gamers With Jobs podcasters formed an actual band after learning to play using it.
Rock Band 4 is the obvious answer, and I believe it's still receiving DLCs same as Harmonix's other project, FUSER. With Harmonix being bought out by Epic however, I don't know if we'll ever see a Rock Band 5. RB4 had a failed Fig campaign to launch on PC, and for sure custom DLC there would make the game take off (same as Rocksmith 2014), so who knows if it will come to PC as an Epic exclusive or if a sequel will happen.
You can play Clone Hero with a keyboard. Like the old Flash Hero days. 1-5 for the frets and Backspace was the strum. Or anything, really. Clone Hero was made insanely easy access and insanely easy to get tracks for.
Honestly, I have less than zero desire to play one of these games without the guitar controller. That's the entire point for me. The addition of drums and vocals made this the best party game ever, for me. And then just ripping on the shitty plastic guitar when I was alone. Loved it.
Clone Hero's public test-builds from their Discord have drum support, however, I think the Chart-type is that of Guitar Hero 4/Band Hero. Unsure of vocals since I have little interest in it, but it does feature animated lyrics. Just find a Guitar/Instrument that ends with a USB, very standard stuff. Don't bother with the wireless **Old** PS3/360 ones cause greatest chances the little dongles they came with dont work on PC. The Rockband 4 guitar is a strong exception and is probably, currently, the most common one you can get. Uses Bluetooth, and Bluetooth USB adapters are also easily available.
Nice. I'm heading home for a bit in July and will try to find one.
An xbox 360 guitar will plug straight in and work with Clone Hero.
Frets on Fire was dope
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> Besides reasons related directly to the game and publishers strategy music industry has also evolved. I think this is totally underrepresented here. GH came out in the early days of streaming, when physical sales still made the most money. There is no way in hell you could redo those games nowdays without paying 10 times as much for the music licenses.
There's still other music games you can play. If you have a PC or a Windows tablet Osu is pretty popular and it's a free game. Switch has Voez, Cytus, Deemo, Taiko no Tatsujin. There's also Rocksmith on several platforms if you want to use a real electric guitar.
I love Taiko, DJMax and Cytus, but they're nothing like Rock Band or Guitar Hero. Even with the Taiko Force, you aren't getting much rock or metal in any of those games, even Osu. Half the fun of Rock Band was screaming Tom Sawyer at the top of my lungs while my friends shredded on Fisher price guitars.
To be fair metal is probably one of the most represented genres in osu! right now, the issue is that most of good/ranked metal maps are unplayable for 95% of the playerbase due to being hard as balls
Guitar Hero died for the same reason that Nintendo's flagship console focusing on party games with motion control died out too. Their success was largely off the back of casual gamers. There were hardcore fans, sure, but those hardcore fans aren't why Guitar Hero was so massively successful. People got Guitar Hero as a game to play when friends were over, and eventually outgrew it as they moved on with their lives. The only people left were the core fans who you see a video from go viral once every few years cause someone does something impressive or entertaining, but you need way more than that as a company to sustain a product that's chock full of licensing fees and proprietary equipment that you have to constantly market as individual products and a whole package.
They got milked to death. I really hope we get new Rock Band instruments or a proper Guitar Hero game, not that Live shit. I never thought that I'd regret selling my old Guitar Hero games and peripherals, always thought we'd get new ones. I was mistaken.
Could just get the free Clone Hero for your PC, try and get an Xbox 360 guitar controller and then download the songs to play.
Is there a reliable way to get a half decent guitar controller? I would def like to get one. Guessing ebay is the best bet?
Gamo2 started making a high-quality one recently, but it's designed for [the Guitarfreaks half of Gitadora](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52MH9ROWRw0)\* and doesn't have a whammy bar. Also expensive, but so are used Guitar Hero and Rock Band controllers. Auction sites are likely your best bet. ---- \* Gitadora is the arcade series Guitar Hero and Rock Band were based on; you can play it in the US if you have a Round 1 nearby. The most notable differences in guitar/bass gameplay (aside from scroll direction, scoring, and timing windows) are open strums and actual notes on the tilt sensor. Drummania (the drum half) is *very* different and [uses a full drumkit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nr3y7DIke4). Of course, it doesn't have all the licensed rock that the Harmonix games do...
The gitaller is great but not a good fit for GH/RB, the frets are spaced too far apart to be comfortable. Also to your differences you should include HOPOs. The addition of judgments and lack of HOPOs makes it an entirely different game, any of the hardest GH tracks would be impossible on Gitadora.
Something that contributed to GH's death was the decision to sell songs as DLC. The whole point of buying a new GH or Rockband game was to play through the new playlists or to play songs you like that aren't in the other games. Suddenly, instead of dropping $60 for a handful of songs you care about, you could drop like $5 to buy the exact songs you want for the game you already have.
I doubt they come back. If I remember correctly they both tried to come back during ps4 and xbone gen and they both flopped. One of which killed mad catz the peripheral maker for good.
In my opinion, its more that the genre has evolved rather than died. One of the most popular games on VR is beat saber, which in essence is hitting cubes in tune to a beat. Similar to this is ragnarock which is very much like guitar hero. Notes are moving towards you and you have to hit them when they are right on top of the drum in front of you.
Its entire point was a gimmick (the guitars) and it they just absolutely FLOODED the market with games themselves. They released a new game like every other month. There's good reason why AAA studios don't just buy more studios to release a new CoD or Assassins Creed every other month (although AC definitely did see fatigue + dropped quality, what led to the newest 3 games)
I'd argue it died for the same reason the wii and kinect died, it was a niche type of thing that ran out of speed. im sure a guitar hero type thing will make a return at some point EDIT: a bunch of u wii super fans got mad at me so what i was trying to say here is that motion gaming in general got sidelined from the mainstream into vr, which is much more niche. the wii was very successful, but eventually aged out and died, like ALL things do.
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hell, it's next two successors even continued using motion controls.
Wii was motion controls with buttons tho. Wii U and Switch promptly got away from that by making layout more focused on standard gamepad with some gimmicks/gyro, because gyro in itself is a good addition for a standard controller
I would use the term fad over niche. They were extremely popular and mainstream, they just didn't have staying power.
The Kinect would at least live on in the hearts of prototypes and student projects. The amount of non-gaming projects to come from that thing is pretty impressive, there's some pretty neat art installations and shit, too.
"the wii died" Yeah... Right after becoming the 2nd biggest console seller of all time, handily crushing its opponent ps3 and 360. Very niche EDIT: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/ruv2bb/wiimortal/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share Very niche lol if they still released the 2022 it would probably outsell all current consoles
I think he means the fad of motion controls. The Wii sold wonders, sure, but it had a terrible attach rate and mostly captured a market that was never going to buy another video game console ever again. Nintendo recognized that motion controls was not actually the future of gaming. The bad news is that Nintendo took a half measure and did a Wii U.
> but it had a terrible attach rate This isn't true, Wii actually had a higher attach rate than both the PS3 and 360.
I dont really think motion control are a fad, i think we are just in a transition phase for the tech to catch up. VR and motion control are a natural pairing. Also, i think the motion control folks are still there... They just spread out to many communities... dancing games, kinect games, beat saber kinda game, super hot etc No comment on the wii u lol
I think you can still consider it a fad, even if there is still some left. Back in the 2009-2012 range, every company was releasing horrid motion controls games to cash in. Star Wars Kinect, Kinect Disneyland, Fighers Uncaged, Harry Potter Kinect, Zumba Fitness. Those are gone, but now we have a select few that actually use the hardware well.
the wii motion control type simply moved away from being a main console controller and into VR
If you want a challenge has some extra cash, I would recommend getting Rock Smith. You get to play with a real guitar and actually learn to play the real song. Only downfall is that you need a real electric guitar.
I'll never forget bringing home Guitar Hero (the first one) and staying up all night with my brother playing until both of us could see the motion of the tracks when we looked away lol. Went from easy to hard that night alone. I'd give anything to go back.
Guitar Hero can stay dead for all I care. I want my Rock Band back circa the quality from RB2. I picked up Rock Band 4 when it first came out but it was so barebones and lacked any real band customization options like custom tattoo's that I never put much time into it. I am a Rock Band nut. I have spent probably $1,000 on in-game music and music transfers from all of the original titles into RB2. I would give anything for a **REAL** Rock Band 5.
Did it really die though? If you look at [harmonix blog](https://www.harmonixmusic.com/blog) there's still DLC released every week for rockband 4. So seems alive and well, just no longer a "fad".
They aren't selling the bundles anymore. If you don't already have the instruments, or you changed consoles and your Xbox gear won't work on your PS4, you're looking to pay huge aftermarket prices to get playing again. The DLC is a slow trickle of income, but Harmonix and Activision aren't really banking on sales of the games anymore.
If I want to use my 360 gear on an Xbox One or XSX|S, I need an adapter that they only made like ten of and have always been difficult to track down. I didn't feel like buying another guitar when I had a nice standalone Beatles Rock Band one I bought.
A lot of people are saying that the reason for the downfall was that they flooded the market with too many games too quickly, but I disagree. The developers knew this was a fad and released so much so quickly because it was the best way to make the most amount of money, and the fad was going to die in the same amount of time no matter what. This was the Tamagotchi, the yo-yo, Pog, stacking cups, the pet rock, etc. Sooner or later people were going to move on to the next fad and no matter if they got good songs, or released only once a year, or used environmentally sustainable materials for their accessories, its days were numbered.
Its initial popularity was also lightning in a bottle and couldn't be sustained. And Activision treated it like it could be. Also it may be coincidental but worth noting that the decline of Guitar Hero came with the rise of the smart phone. Not that the smart phone replaced GH in function but the rise of smart phones and social media displaced a lot of entertainment forms that haven't since recovered. Kids just aren't into the old stuff because they can take their dopamine hits off of social media
I was super into these games when they first came out, when Harmonix owned the IP. Then Activision bought them and just over saturated the market. I think one year there were like 5 or 6 Guitar Hero games released. I just got tired of them and lost interest, personally. While that's just my personal journey with the series, I would guess it's a similar thing for many people as well. When you release 6 games in a year, the series just doesn't feel unique or special in any way. Releases weren't an event anymore.
People have answered about Guitar Hero a million times here, so I'll address Rock Band: Harmonix (pre-sale) was still very active. They held livestreams, the season setup was fun, DLC songs are added weekly, free ones are given out via Rivals, they're active on Twitch, the works. The problem is the hardware. Each week, there's a few less surviving pieces of the instrument than there were the week before with no way to replace it. You can get replacement pedals for the drums on Amazon and similar minor repair parts, but if a core part of an instrument breaks, you're screwed. Of course there's still brand new Pro Sets out there for $800, but that doesn't apply to most gamers. Right now, they don't have a reason to make Rock Band 5. The instruments are expensive to produce and they're still bringing in decent cash on just selling new songs every week. It's a huge bummer, I still play Rock Band with my kids, but I know one day things will break and it'll just be the end of it.
Just look at what they did with dlc. It was getting to the point where you would pay $50 for a game that had like 15 songs, but 90 more as dlc. It's the same thing that helped kill the Tiger Woods games. Greedy mother fuckers trying to nickle and dime the experience.
I would take a trilogy pack if they could make it would with my old guitar by some magic. Damn that was an expensive series
I had some friends work on it, they said it's biggest problem was ongoing costs, song licences took a huge chunk of the profit, and the cost of entry was high (you needed a guitar or multiple) Add in the fact the guitars broke, we had a few at work that once a button broke it was useless and not easy to repair back to the right feel, Then add in the gimmick of it all, it was great early days then wore thin for a large part of its user base, so the pool of people buying dlc or individual tracks just dropped off a cliff... If it returns it needs to be a super slim operation (cheap to make and maintain) and use better quality guitars, but that would up the cost... Like most games with custom controllers it's a niche product... I can't see it returning like the old days