Background
Rhythm games are games where the player's actions are based around a song or music track that is playing. A notable example is Guitar Hero, where the player "strums" a plastic guitar accessory in time with the game in order to score points.
Rhythm games have risen to popularity surprisingly quickly in recent times.
Go back five years, and rhythm gaming was an ultra-niche enthusiasm, a Japanese-dominated realm of breathtaking arcade performances on dazzling specialist machines, played at home only by the most dedicated western importer.
Skilled rhythm gamers stood alongside 2D-shooter obsessives as ambassadors from a foreign culture.
However, today’s rhythm gamer has millions of faces: male, female, teenager, parent, banker, student, real-life rockstar.
Had anyone told Guitar Hero developer Harmonix in 1999 that North Americans would spend US$1.19 billion on music games during just one month in 2008, delight would surely have been dwarfed by disbelief.
But this meteoric rise to popularity and profitability has had a fatalistic tinge. Year on year, sales of music games have plummeted at an even more accelerated rate than global recession can account for.
There’s a feeling that we may have seen the genre’s peak. It’s difficult, in fact, to imagine that people will ever buy almost two million rhythm games in a single month again, as they did with Guitar Hero 3 in November 2007.
Glossary
Importer: A gamer, usually from the Western world, who regularly purchases games not available in their country, through the Internet or specialized shops.
Developer: A company or studio which creates a game
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