This morning, venerable industry magazine Edge posted a snippet from a feature in the current issue, which discusses the present and future of music games. The headline (“Harmonix: Music Genre Hasn’t Peaked”) references a quote from Harmonix CEO Alex Rigopulos about 2009′s revenue drop for music games: “In the long term,” he says, “people’s passion for music isn’t going away, and rhythm gaming will continue to provide people with a deeper level of engagement with the music they love.”
I certainly agree, but that’s not the most interesting thing in the article, for me. That comes later, in a quote from Neversoft’s Brian Bright about the possibility of ever besting Guitar Hero III’s ridiculous sales:
“[O]nly time will tell, but it’s a tall order,” says Bright. “I think user-created content is key to the evolution. … I think the key is to create music, but make it compelling to create, so the game is in the creation, not the playback.”
I suppose it’s possible Bright is speaking of GHTunes in its current incarnation, but I kind of doubt it. Sounds to me like the next Guitar Hero could put a new music studio front-and-center, with a more user-friendly interface and more of a “game-y” quality to it. Or is that just wishful thinking?
I’m sure they’ll add a less functional version of RBN and pretend they thought of it first. Kind of like when they were claiming GHWT was the first band game even though they were a year late.