From the article: "It’s probably no secret that I am a huge fan of the Rock Band series. Hell, it seems like most of the time, I’m only contributing news that is related to Rock Band or another rhythm game. Last night, @RockBand tweeted asking if anyone was up to doing some math to figure out how much all of the hardware, DLC, and games would cost. I have no idea why, but I ended up doing it."
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.
Dave writes: "Hopefully time will be kind to Rock Band 3. It’s the equivalent of a Blade Runner or Van Gogh, unappreciated and undersold in its own time, but something that has undeniable quality. We may never see another Rock Band, no encore to this great series, but in Rock Band 3 and Rock Band 4, we got some pretty awesome final tracks."
That's a hell of a lot of money.
"$6,410 – Grand Total"
You could set up a real band for that kind of money...
Twenty five bucks.
ive spent probably $2k on rock band when i go back and add it all up hahaha.
money well spent though, as that has given me (and my mates at parties etc) hundreds and hundreds of hours of entertainment