The announcement of Green Day: Rock Band has got lots of folks speculating about whether the Rock Band franchise is going the way of the Guitar Hero franchise — with multiple single-band releases and offshoots.
So today I have two questions for you: First, do you think the Green Day game is a legitimate indicator that Rock Band is going down this road?
And second: Does it matter? That is, do you agree that this practice harms the franchise in particular and/or the music-game genre in general?
For your consideration: Remember that Rock Band has already turned out a bunch of track packs, which could be seen as having started this process already. Do these count? I’ll also point you an excellent post at RockBandAide about possible reasons for Green Day: Rock Band, which raises a lot of solid points about the game and the potential repercussions. Be sure not to miss the interesting points raised in the comments.
What do you think?
Track Packs are just repackaged DLC. I think that people that try to count them as full releases like GH:M/GH:A are just desperate to have evidence against RB.
I also don’t see how GD:RB could be considered over saturation. It’s the only announced project by Harmonix at the moment. Surely a developer should always be working on something?
We’re in an economic crisis of some sort right? I don’t fault Rock Band for going down this route- DLC is great to maintain their current audience but they need something to induct new players into the whole Rock Band ecosystem. Even though Beatles RB brought more appeal to more people, the tracks were not transferrable- hence, the game did not funnel Beatles players to RB2. I view this whole Green Day thing as an experiment- whether or not it will funnel new players into the RB2 ecosystem via Green Day’s retail box. And of course, this will provide Harmonix with great data to tweak and come up with more business models regarding track distribution.
If this is a “specialized” track pack, then I’m not concerned about over saturation. Meaning, if the time and effort of HMX put into this and the price of the game is somewhere slightly above the DLC track packs (but below TB:RB), then this is a natural evolution. I’m hoping it is much like the AC:DC track pack but done better (fonts, avatars and venues are cool additions, especially if they don’t come at a huge price premium).
We don’t get angry about our CD player (or ipod, etc) being over saturated with music because a band puts out another CD. We buy it or we don’t, based on how much we want it. Nobody complains because another band puts out a CD – they probably don’t even know about it if they aren’t a fan. The exportability and “platform” nature of Rock Band makes this a fair analogy to games like RB:GD.
I’d argue that if they released even more of these (at not full game cost) it would actually lead to less feeling of over doing it. If Green Day isn’t your thing and it’s the major release of the year, that’s an issue. If there is another band release 2 months down the road, then eventually you’ll just pick and choose your bands and it becomes more like on-disc DLC (with cool “album art”) than full blown video game releases.
Great points, everyone. I particularly like this analogy from Mike: “We don’t get angry about our CD player (or ipod, etc) being over saturated with music because a band puts out another CD.” That’s a good point, and something I hadn’t considered. If we think of Rock Band as a music platform (which I really think we should), the idea of oversaturation becomes pretty ridiculous.
I suspect the complaints are more on the part of those who think of this as game first, music second.
I feel that individual band games are great, as long as they arent filled with songs by other groups. I see the main problem of GH’s previous band installments being the “filler” that they shove into those games just so they can say it has more songs. If I want a certain bands game, then just give me that bands songs in it.
They say that the songs in Green Day Rock Band will be transferrable into my rock band library, just like ACDC before. But the problem there is that once I transferred, I have hardly looked at my ACDC disc. I prefer to play them in my RB2 game vs the ACDC disc. Now, being able to play as Green Day themselves and doing it all similar to RB Beatles is fine, but once I transfer the songs, whats gonna keep me playing the Green Day game?
I think they should cut costs and just make it all downloadable. Download the songs. Download the bands as playable characters. Wouldnt that just be easier?
even though 2 rock band games were released this year, it’s not as bad as 4 guitar hero games.
if gd rb is suppose to be the successor of tb rb, it would make perfect sense to release rb 3 later on. gd rb could be like harmonix’s warm up act while rb 3 is the main event. as long as rb band based are as polished as (or more) than tb rb, i think we’ll be okay especially since we still get weekly dlc and the highly-anticipated rock band network.
now it’s true that green day rock band won’t be appealing to a lot of rock band veterans, but the same can be said for tb rb. have you green day’s fanbase? i think financially harmonix will be okay when the releases and above all else, harmonix has never disappointed because at least for them, it still seems that they care more for quality than quantity. in the end, that’s all that really should matter.
I think it’s actually a good move and consistent with Harmonix general philosophy, since all the songs are going to be exportable.
I’ve written about this here:
http://rbgh.wordpress.com/2009/12/16/green-day-rock-band-my-thoughts/