I saw this coming a long time ago. It's basically a repeat of history.
Konami pumped 1st-5th Mix in a rather short period of time, and it almost killed the game. that's why they slowed down with the games IMO

I find the entire rhythm game genre to over saturated this moment ESPECIALLY because of what Activision has done with Guitar Hero. After Guitar Hero 5 comes out, they will have out I think 7 or 8 games onto the market within about 4 years. TOO MUCH. (this does not count Guitar Hero 1 & 2, those were made by Harmonix back then)
 Harmonix I think figured it out which is why there has only been two rockband games. Why release new versions when they now can release new song packs every week online?
It is funny how all of this is reminiscent of DDR in america though.......You think people would learn right?



Man I can't wait to see what Konami is gonna do when Scratch: The Ultimate DJ and DJ Hero come out......*sigh*
oh Konami, such missed opportunity......

..or if you look at it from the other point of view: They saw how Konami lost steam with DDR and wanted to release as many games as they could in a short period.

Activision has also done the same with some of their other lines (Tony Hawk Pro Skater comes to mind), so I don't think it's a "oops we over saturated the market," but more of a "let's saturate the market before this fad is gone!"

Harmonix is doing the slow method, releasing lots of content for 2 games, instead of new games; but if the fad is gone, there's no game to sell content for anymore.

I don't think the Tony Hawk comparison is fair though, because all of the games up until skate stole the fire. I think that competitive players just played 1,2,3 and THUG though. The rest of the series doesn't have much to offer in comparison. It's not a matter of oversaturation, but a matter of quality control in this case.

There is one caveat to all these posts, being the figures in $ sales and NOT UNIT SALES. During the economic downturn game prices have gone down for big bundles like RB  and GH in order to get them moving off of shelves.

Sorry Bemani fanboys, your least favorite franchises are alive and kicking.

http://gamasutra.com/news?story=24482
Is a good read to get a less cookie-cutter view on the issue while
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4083/npd_behind_the_numbers_june_2009.php
Should give you a feel on how gaming in general is doing.

Decreased sales for any game are perfectly normal right now. The article posted by joystiq is giving you an incomplete picture. It's a good tactic to be alarmist when writing a blog, but it doesn't always make for the most accurate news (see: Kotaku).

TL;DR ver:
More releases are making less money. That doesn't mean the overall money / overall units sold is less, it's just divided up among a few releases. GH sales are in trouble, but recently posted 2 billion dollars in overall sales, including DLC. RB is really down in physical sales, but DLC is doing great. Remember folks, these traditional store statistics don't include DLC sales.

You can throw numbers out all day long but in the end, just look at how much interest there is in GH 5 compared to when 3 came out. It's come a long way and there're many people who are done with the franchise, me included. Out of all my friends (many of us play bemani games regularly), only 1 is interested in the next main GH game. I still feel that they oversaturated the market, and if I'm wrong, then so be it. I guess we'll find out in the next 24 months or so.

Numbers tell you a lot more than anecdotal evidence such as "interest" among a few friends. Your sample group is too small to be indicative of the ENTIRE GH fanbase. It's one thing to have personal experience, it's another to have market data tell you something. Market data is your situation on a macro, and on a macro level things are not as dire as you put them, especially with RBN coming out. DLC is looking like the wave of the future with these games. It does beg the question though: when will NPD include DLC / downloads in sales statistics?

So there is now:

GH1
GH2
GH-Rock 80's
GH3
GHA
GHWT
GHM
GH5

Then there is:
Rock Band 1
Rock Band 2

That many guitar hero games is unnecessary.  Harmonix nailed it by releasing DLC.  I'm not saying I boycott Guitar Hero, but they are milking every possible avenue by just selling a new game.  Why sell DLC at $2 bucks a song over a longer period of time when you can sell a brand new game for $60 immediately?  

The thing is, is that people continue to buy.  Buying a new GH game may not bring as many fans or repeat buyers, but people keep buying.  Why stop now?

Personally, I love both Rock Band and Guitar Hero.  But I think the decline was GHWT.  Contrary that, Guitar Hero Metallica was great, just since I love the band.  I think they should only keep releasing band specific GH's, max 1 per year.  The only reason I bought GHM was since I knew it was going to be a great and fun game.  I did not buy GHA since I am not a huge fan of it.  I think by strategizing their releases as such, GH will target certain fans one year and another round of fans next year.  This helps eliminate saturation of the market by NOT trying to target everyone at one time.  

Plus, who likes seeing Activision make you buy a new game just so they can pop you for 60?  I don't and it makes me NOT want to support or buy from them.  But I am just one lonely guy.

Rock Band DLC is the best thing that Harmonix has going.  DLC has been on an up rise, bringing better and more popular DLC as time goes on.  I believe that having this DLC brought to solid gameplay is better than bringing new songs to a new game twice a year.  

I think Guitar Hero 5 better have some pretty ground breaking content, otherwise releasing another GH after that is going to produce next to nothing.

The problem with DLC though, is that it's too expensive compared to the price of a new game on a disc.

$2 / song is *not* cool. (This is how much is it on the wii)

You could argue "but you save by not paying for songs you'll never play," but when other people come over, they play those songs, so I'm glad I have them. I don't think DLC is the end all savior due to this reason, but it definitely is the way things are going, once better pricing is figured out for it.

i think gh's current decline is pretty much defined by their announcement compared to hmx's rock band network announcement:

"we got a digitized version of carlos santana!"

and why wait to pay 60 bucks for new songs on gh sequel #54318 when the same songs will slowly trickle to rb for 2 bucks individual track or 3 song artist pack for 5.50???

It's a creative way to make people pay more for less.
I think if anything seals the nail in the GH coffin it'll be the upcoming Rock Band Network, not the economy or in store sales. GH needs to up its online ante to match RB in this aspect.

Play a song six times and it's cheaper than playing at the arcade.

I bought some of those Pepsi Rock Band caps on ebay a couple weeks ago.  If you are looking for cheap DLC, its worth to get them.  Ends up being about 50 cents a song.

http://www.pepsirockband.com/

I don't think the DLC is too expensive if you seek out point card deals.  Sometimes places have $20 cards for $15 or lower.

Its also nice that Rock Band games have been exportable to the HDD, so that you can share songs between them.  I think Guitar Hero just started doing this with DLC, but not songs from the default song lists.

1_ There's no comparison because there is no (good) GH or RB at arcade.
2_ It's a moot point that a fixed cost is cheaper than a recurring one.
3_ When you go to the arcade you are paying for the experience, not just the game. People play at arcades and home for entirely different reasons.

1.  Totally true.  I was referring to music games in general though.
2.  I'm just pointing it out because it's being ignored.  It's not a moot point; it's the point.
3.  When you're playing Rock Band, you're (hopefully) playing it for the experience, not because you think it's a serious game that merits practice in solitude.  The entire idea behind the game is to chill out and play with friends.

2) No one here is dumb enough to ignore that point. Everyone knows this and just because they don't acknowledge it doesn't mean they aren't aware of it.
3) So many people play RB and GH seriously.  And when I say experience I'm talking "the arcade experience": getting to go to a facility with (hopefully) good games with better than home controls. Think about it this way: why do people still pay to see movies on the big screen at theaters? The experience.  Greg LoPiccolo's doesn't say that a group experience is part of the vision for Harmonix. He specifically said that he wants the player to "actually make musical decisions with musical consequences and gameplay consequences." This is also totally setting aside the fact that MTV had Harmonix make RB because they saw an opportunity in that Harmonix couldn't develop GH after being bought by MTV, so they could have a game uniquely attributable to the MTV branding and not Activision. They went pretty crazy trying to push this, like having RB in The Real World etc.

I don't. Movies are too expensive and lame these days. Plus, if you get a decent HDTV it'll look better than the projectors at the theater anyways.

I guess this is the same reason I didn't see the point in $1/per song to play GH: Arcade either. What a rip off.

Best theater projectors run at upwards of 2160p. Unless you have a CRT HDTV, you can never see true blacks either.

GH Arcade is a rip off because it's an unfinished game. If it was a finished game I think the music gaming community might take better to it.

Perhaps, but due to the screen sizes at theaters, the image has to distribute those pixels over a larger area. Hence the actual size of the pixel still appears larger at the theaters compared to a pixel on an HDTV. But whatever you think doesn't matter to me. I saw Dark Knight on Blue Ray, with a correctly calibrated TV and that kicks the crap out of the theater that I went to. I swear I could almost reach out and touch Batman's nipples! Plus, when you can buy the movie for the price of two tickets, I'll opt for the ownership of the movie versus the one time showing.

And what do you mean GH: Arcade is "unfinished"? It looked plenty done to me, but it's just a lazy port of the CS version. If you mean they should've spent more time developing an adequate arcade title instead of simply ripping off GH3, then that makes sense.

That's why being seated farther away helps: distortion is mitigated and the picture ids good. I do see your point though, it's just two different schools.

The game globally being a half note off constitutes unfinished :p Revisions are commonplace now because most boards use CD's or plain Windows. I can see ten or 15 years ago it being a problem because it would mean having to reprint the board, but now they just need a pen drive or CD and your machine is patched. It's just lazsiness and using the GH branding to shield shoddy work.

I consider myself corrected.


First point here seems solid; this is why I always criticize friends who want to sit in the front in theaters; I always go for the third or fourth row from the back, so I get the best picture quality.

A half note off?  Seems like a bogus figure, since a half note is not global throughout the game.  Probably 200-500ms off, and mostly due to them not doing enough research to know that the display they're using has a significant latency, especially since they're probably not actually using HDMI like they ought to.  That would be a half note if every song were 600-240 bpm, respectively.  The games "unfinished" status is due to hardware more than anything.  If they invested $100 per cabinet more into their hardware, it would be a "finished" game.  The reason they don't bother to finish it is because at this point they probably either:
a. Feel that the name will sell the series out, and that game quality is arbitrary.
or
b. Believe that a low initial standard of quality will make future releases more popular.

Like with DDR, it's too late in the game's popularity for quality to make money.  It's the same issue with when I talked to Art about getting ITG2.  Ground Kontrol caters to people who are going to get wasted and recognize the DDR brand name, not come every day to play the best game available, so quality isn't going to make enough money to justify the opportunity costs.

lol

This is what happened with me at Magic Mountain years back. We wandered through the arcade and some poor kid was playing PiU. He got bored within 1 minute and walked off so I decided to give this "lame DDR rip off" a go. I finished one song and was done with it. I didn't care for it at all. To this day I'm still not a huge PiU fan, though I do recognize it as being a great alternative to DDR for some poeple.

Guitar Hero Arcade is unplayable due to video and audio lag. DDR X is also just as unplayable, but mostly due to pad issues. I've had numerous AAAs on the English "location test" cabinet, which is a JP cabinet with US software.

Yeah, it's pretty bogus considering I kept getting misses and couldn't even tell why. A half note I'd say is the median, of course it's not consistent. I guess it's kinda like Max 2: the timing windows seem small because everything is so fucking offsync.

reread your post, one more incorrect statement that I need to fix.
You're totally incorrect about the late popularity quality thing. Look at international releases of FF games. Those always sell well. Sell well to the point of warranting greatest hits printings.
DDR can't make money because of ITG 2. ITG 2 R4 / R16 /  R21 singlehandedly destroyed the market for four arrow dance games. Konami was pretty stupid to attack Roxor in the end: If they would have kept making games after EX Roxor would have never made ITG, which would have never led to custom songs and the embarassment of the DDR brand amongst hardcore players (In hindsight this is 20/20, so if I were Konami I probably would have done the same thing). ITG 2 just raised the bar so high for player's expectations of a four arrow dance game that no other DDR game has (or legally can) have the variety of music and steps, as well as community support. DDR is more dead than it ever has been.

I'm not exactly sure which argument you're trying to address here.  I do agree that ITG2's high standards killed DDR, but I'm unsure what that proves against my claims.