Guitar Hero and Rock Band were once huge franchises. Over time retailers and consumers became over-saturated with plastic instruments and the games didn't do much to innovate beyond the original formula (especially in Guitar Hero's case). While Guitar Hero is mostly dead, Rock Band lives on, and Harmonix remains confident in the franchise's future, even if the developer is somewhat unsure of what shape the next game will take.
Harmonix VP of Product Development Greg LoPiccolo recently told IndustryGamers,"We think there’s a lot of life left in the Rock Band franchise and there’s a lot of creative directions to take that. We certainly remain committed to that. But then beyond that, we would love to make games that are new musical experiences to throw them out there and have people accept them and get inspired by them."
LoPiccolo also stressed that the decline of the guitar gaming sector isn't representative of a lack of interest in music games overall.
"Harmonix would draw a distinction between sort of band performance simulators, such as Rock Band and what Guitar Hero ended up turning into, and music games overall. So certainly it’s impossible to ignore the fact that Rock Band and Guitar Hero saw a pretty significant decline in sales over this last cycle. I guess we see the genre of music gaming as a broader thing, as having a lot of other creative possibilities outside that domain that we would like to explore," he noted.
He continued, "Within Rock Band, I think we are very much committed to the franchise. We’re not quite sure what form that takes right now, but even in Rock Band 3 we were exploring some new ideas, some new directions, and we’re very pleased with how the Pro stuff came out. The Fender Squire Guitar... we’re incredibly proud of how that came out and the way it kind of conceptually pushes music gaming in a new space where you can pick this thing up and learn to play guitar, or keys, or drums. So we’re interested in that thread and how that could evolve. And all along we’ve been working on other kind of evolutionary directions to take Rock Band and Rock Band game play that we find exciting. So I think from our perspective we want to keep creating things that we think are cool and compelling and push the envelope in new directions, and then the market will pronounce its judgment on our efforts. But that’s, to some degree, out of our hands. It’s our job to make good stuff."
Ultimately, LoPiccolo believes the future of music gaming will be bright and that a positive direction to take it would be to incorporate more creativity from the player.
"There’s a lot of other threads that I don’t really want to necessarily get very specific on, mostly because of the stuff we’re building that is really very crude and doesn’t work very well yet, but we see a lot of other creative possibilities for music gaming. One thing for instance that really has not been successfully explored that we would love to crack in some way is music gaming experiences that allow the player some creative input," he remarked. "For instance, Rock Band was really fun, but you’re really pretending to play other people’s music. I think it would be I think really exciting to come up with a game experience where, like in lots of other games, you have some creative choice. There’s lots of games where you kind of get to make stuff or you make tactical choices that have consequences and it would be great to apply some of those."
We're certainly eager to find out what Harmonix is working on. It looks like we'll find out at E3.
