The Present and Future State of Music Games - Editorials

Sidd turns his gaze to music games and what it might mean for the games industry.

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The Present and Future State of Music Games

Four or five years ago, it seemed as if the music industry was in deep trouble. Websites and applications such as Napster, Limewire, Kazaa and Torrents made people think twice about buying music. Record sales slipped and it seemed that the music industry had failed to keep up with technology. Who would have guessed that video games would serve as the saving grace for musicians and labels to get their music across to the masses? Games such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band have sold tens of millions of songs.

In 2005, the first Guitar Hero was released and four years later there have been a number of spin-offs and knock off’s. While music games have taken off in the past several years, there appears to be growing concern over the alarming rate that Guitar Hero and Rock Band are releasing sequels and separate games within the series. Will this oversaturation of the market lead to music games being labeled as a fad? Only time will tell.

Harmonix, the company responsible for the Rock Band franchise was the original developer behind the first two Guitar Hero’s before Activision bought the series. After Activision purchased the franchise, Tony Hawk developer Neversoft became

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the brains behind the Guitar Hero series and churned out Guitar Hero 3, Aerosmith, World Tour and the recently released Metallica edition. After the Guitar Hero franchise was sold, Harmonix partnered up with MTV to produce the Rock Band series.

It really wasn’t until 2007, when musicians and the music labels began to pay close

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attention to video games and their potential as a new market to license music from the past and present. Guitar Hero III and Rock Band got the ball rolling the fall of 2007, both featuring master tracks from artists including The Rolling Stones, The Smashing Pumpkins, Weezer and the Killers.

Both games were able to offer a compelling replay value through offering customers downloadable content (DLC). While Guitar Hero’s DLC has been mixed to say the least, Harmonix has been successful in delivering high quality songs and albums, which span rock music history. Since its release in 2007, Rock Band has managed to release new songs every week. At first, about 3 songs were released per week and up until now about 7-10 songs are typically released per week. Some of the bands Harmonix has released as DLC include The Foo Fighters, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rush and Guns N’ Roses. In the case of Guns N’ Roses, who would have thought in 1993 that Axl Rose would debut a song off their long awaited album Chinese Democracy in a video game?

While most artists seem to have welcomed video games as a way to reach new audiences, there still are artists who haven’t been so receptive. Most notably Green Day, Nickelback and Led Zepplin. Nickelback’s case is quite interesting. On one hand they have spoken out against Guitar Hero and a few weeks later one of their songs conveniently found its way as Guitar Hero World Tour DLC. This might be a sign that the music labels have more say over which artists can appear in games, than the actual artists themselves..

One of Harmonix’s greatest strength is there design philosophy of building a platform. What this means is that unlike Activision, you don’t have to keep buying Guitar Hero games time and time again in order to play specific songs. Rather, all songs are available as downloadable content for both Rock Band 1 and 2 (with exception to the on disc songs). Instead of releasing catalogs of downloadable content from certain bands, Activision has continued to release spin-off’s of Guitar Hero including Guitar Hero: Aerosmith and Metallica, and it is heavily rumoured that Van Halen will be the next band to get their own game. Van Halen? Are they really worthy of their own Guitar Hero game? Isn’t it just simpler to release a few albums or greatest hits collection as DLC? In addition to band specific spin offs, Activision is also releasing Guitar Hero Smash Hits, Guitar Hero V, and seperate DS Versions later this year. Guitar Hero Smash Hits planned for this June includes the best songs from first four games in the series, except now all the songs are master tracks and can be played as a full band. At the current time it does not appear that the game will support any DLC. It probably would have been simpler to release these songs as DLC for Guitar Hero World Tour. Harmonix has taken a different approach occasionally releasing songs from Guitar Hero 1 and 2 as DLC for Rock Band. Some notables include Message in a Bottle by the Police and Monkey Wrench by the Foo Fighters, both of which were found in Guitar Hero 2.

While Harmonix seems to have hit its stride with DLC, it has slowly followed Activision’s lead by releasing an AC/DC track pack that was compatible with Rock Band 1 and 2 as well as announcing a Beatles and Lego version of Rock Band both due this fall. The Beatles version of Rock Band with the full set of instruments will cost around $250.00, which is considerably higher than all the available SKU’s for Guitar Hero World Tour and Rock Band 1 and 2. The Beatles are certainly an important band in music history, but I am still divided over how well it will sell next to Guitar Hero. In my opinion, Rock Band is a vastly superior game to Guitar Hero, but Guitar Hero has name recognition, which obviously contributes to the success of its sales. Harmonix has been quite mum on details concerning the Beatles game, but one interesting tidbit is that the game does support harmonizing, so you and three of your friends can get in on the singing, provided you have three microphones.

If your sitting in the shoes of a musician, then you’re probably in a pretty good spot. The licensing deals that companies such as MTV and Activision have struck with the music labels is based on downloads. An average song retails for about $2.00. Out of the $2.00, about $1.00 is split between the artist and the label, while the rest goes to the Publishers and Developers. However, recent news has indicated that Warner Music Group, which features notable artists such as Metallica, Paramore and Linkin Park are pushing game companies to increase the amount paid to the music labels. In response to Warner, Harmonix has gone out of their way to not license any new Warner Music at the moment. It remains to be seen what the outcome of the stand off will be, but I think Warner Music will come to their senses and realize that it makes economic sense to keep licensing music to MTV and Activision.

What does the future hold for music games? It seems in the past year there has been a huge jump from guitar only to a full band experience. There is always the possibility of adding additional instruments such as a keyboard peripheral, but how this would work still remains to be seen. Adding additional instruments at first thought seems impractical since we can only have so many scrolling note charts on the screen at once.

One of the biggest challenges facing developers is how they will innovate their series. Would this innovation come in the form of new and upgraded instruments or will it rely more on customization such as user-generated music? Guitar Hero World Tour took the first steps to implement user created music, but the results were mixed as vocal tracks were not included. Harmonix has hinted that user created music is in the series future, but such a feature probably won’t see the light of day until next year. It’s difficult to imagine how much further Activision and MTV can push the envelope to keep their music games evolving, but one thing is certain, stand alone products as we’ve seen this year will not suffice in the years to come.

- Siddharth Masand

(September 28, 2009)