Sales Slowing Down
Guitar Hero and Rock Band’s disc-based updates are not selling at anything like the pace of their forebears, while new forays such as DJ Hero, made in 2009, have had their sales expectations dramatically dashed at retail.
If rhythm gaming needs to take a different form in order to maintain its success, the Rock Band Network is certainly going in the right direction, giving musicians the opportunity to offer their music to fans without using Harmonix as a note-charting middleman.
This could potentially widen the selection of Rock Band tracks, and there would appear to be an appetite for it.
DLC Sales Still Healthy
Despite the slowing sales of disc-based music games, which in 2009 were between 30 and 55 per cent on 2008, data from Microsoft suggests that DLC is selling as well over Xbox Live as it ever has.
Rigopulos, at least, remains optimistic.
“I absolutely do not believe that rhythm-action gaming has reached its peak,” he asserts.
“Of course, 2009 was a tough year with the recession, which especially affects music games given the relatively high price point of instrument bundles."
Passion Still Remains
"But in the long term, 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."
"So, yes, I do think that future music games will exceed the sales success of last generation.”
Conclusion
It’s not the human love of music alone that has driven the popularity of rhythm gaming over the past decade: music games are, just as importantly, some of the purest examples of videogames full stop.
Successful examples haven’t just awakened the wider world to the universal power of music, but to the very nature, appeal and transformative power of games themselves.
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Glossary
Xbox Live: The online network run by Microsoft for its Xbox 360. Users can browse the Xbox Live Marketplace to download game demos and items, among others, and can also use it to play online with each other in multiplayer games.
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