Game Informer - Song licensing is what drove the music game craze a few years ago, but it also comes with its problems as well. Harmonix is notifying Rock Band owners what happens when a license expires.
On a Facebook posting, the company explains that some of the licenses for a "very limited number of songs" offered as DLC have expired and won't be available to purchase in the Rock Band store or first-party online marketplaces.
TheGamer Writes "Harmonix has proven plenty of times it can make Rock Band work without instruments."
I mean, yeah, but was anyone saying otherwise? The fact is people liked the plastic instruments rather than pressing buttons on a controller. They enjoyed the simulated experience.
"Work"? No, but to be good? It's absolutely necessary. Not having the accessories is like playing a lightgun shooter with an analog stick sure it works, but one experience is completely unique and fun as hell, and other is torture trying to make do playing in a way it was never meant to be played
I think CHEAP plastic instruments is THE reason why the instrument-genre ‘died’.
People invested in buying the game AND the peripherals, so the guitar, the dj-set, the drum, whatever, and the experience was absolutely fantastic. Great fun, great music, etc.
But then the instruments would break. A button would stop working, or your hits wouldn’t register, and that kind of hardware failure would end in you not being able to play the game as intended, and thus you not getting the scores you deserve.
So, now you had a great game, but a broken instrument, and nobody is gonna buy a new plastic instrument every 3-6 months in order to keep playing the game.
A solution would have been to release better quality instruments (obviously), at a slightly higher price, so you could have kept the new games coming and the genre alive, but sadly, that didn’t happen.
Bust a Groove, Gitaroo Man and Parrapa the Rappa were such good games. Neither needed any extra peripherals
Harmonix, best known for their work on the Rock Band franchise, has announced that they're becoming a part of the Epic Games family.
Harmonix, the developer behind Rock Band and Dance Central, reveal some new gameplay footage for the upcoming DJ song-mixing game.