Aha. Remember when I mentioned that the dire accounts of plummeting music-game revenues were not the whole story? An article at LiveScience hints at one item that might give a clearer picture of the health of music games: peripheral revenue.
According to the piece, peripheral manufacturers raked in around $5 billion dollars in 2009, with at least one company — Mad Catz, who happens to make a pretty hefty number of Rock Band controllers — increasing revenue by over 25 percent from 2008.
Now, the article doesn’t separate out revenues from music-game peripherals from the overall numbers, so I can’t tell you exactly how big an impact these figures might have if you were to consider them as part of the music game market. But consider that music game revenues last year just broke $1 billion; so if even one tenth of those peripheral sales were music controllers, that would outpace 2008′s revenues of about $1.4 billion. And that’s not accounting for DLC.
The lesson here: Don’t be too quick to call music games down for the count.
I think music games have more of a “long tail” of sorts in terms of sales, and usually people will snap copies of Music Game X up when Music Game X has a certain big deal.
BJ