In an interview with Game Informer, Harmonix executive Chris Rigopulos has revealed that DLC is in Rock Band’s immediate future, with over 100 million songs having been downloaded so far.
“We recently hit a significant milestone; more than 100 million songs have been downloaded for Rock Band. It’s amazing,” said Rigopulos. “Nearly 5 million accounts have downloaded a song from the Rock Band catalog. With all of the negative press around the band genre, you might be surprised to learn that we still see more than a million unique users log on each month to play Rock Band and to pick up new music – and it’s not the same million players each month.”
“We now have more than 2,700 songs available, across on-disc content, downloadable content and the Rock Band Network. That number continues to grow week by week and is pretty staggering considering we only started doing DLC in 2007.”
Rigopulos clarified that all revenue from DLC is now going directly to Harmonix, and the company is continuing its commitment to bringing more classic and new music to the Rock Band Network.
“At this point, we’ve effectively severed all ties with MTV, and all proceeds from Rock Band belong to Harmonix,” he added. “We have an amazing lineup of DLC scheduled for May, including new tracks from the Foo Fighters, Lady Gaga, and Ozzy Osbourne. A large, diverse DLC library allows people to customize their music content in the game to suit their individual preferences. You can’t achieve that efficiently with frequent retail disc releases.”
One thing that players cannot expect, with this continuing focus on DLC for the existing Rock Band Network, is a release of Rock Band 4. Harmonix's VP of Product Development Greg LoPiccolo previously told IndustryGamers that the franchise still has a "lot of life left" in it, even if the studio isn't "quite sure what form that takes right now."
“We’re not planning a Rock Band 4 disc release in 2011. Rock Band 3 is a big game with lots of available music content and lots of new goals and challenges. We want to give our fans the time to explore that fully. But rest assured that Harmonix is still developing new ideas and concepts to advance the Rock Band franchise, and we look forward to sharing those when the time is right,” Rigopulos closed.
