Music Rhythm Games - Where Do We Go From Here?

Opinion from Sarge - Thursday, 04 November 2010 @ 6:28pm

This was mainly inspired by a thread Luke started on the forums the other day, where he declared that the genre of Music Rhythm games is dead. There's been a notable decline in sales from both Guitar Hero: Warriors Of Rock, Rock Band 3 and DJ Hero 2.

Now, I guess whether or not that declares the genre 'dead' all depends on your definition of a sales success. When it comes to games like the Call Of Duty series, it's all about opening week sales, because that's where the big bucks are going to be made - after that, sales die off pretty quickly. When it comes to music games though, there's plenty of tail-end sales to be made in the form of DLC. For the sake of not turning this into a thesis, I'll concentrate on the latest Guitar Hero, Rock Band and DJ Hero games for now.

There's the common complaint that the titles are now "just pumping out the same old thing again and again", but this isn't entirely un-true, it's also a little bit of an easy go-to excuse, because in truth, each of the games has still improved and expanded on their previous title.

There's also the complaint that "these games get really boring really quickly", but in truth, music games are not meant to be played for hours and hours at a time. For example, I'm currently playing through some of the new Red Dead Redemption DLC and while I'm there, I've been going back to get some extra side-quests that I missed out on last time, so I've been playing 3 and 4 hours in a single sitting, but as much as I love Rock Band, I struggle to play it for longer than an hour or two before I'm getting bored - most of the time, I'll just play 2 or 3 songs and think "yup, that's my fill for today". But that's okay and it's definitely not something that should be seen as a sign of a game failure.

Music games are fun to play on your own, but are primarily meant to be enjoyed with friends. Regardless of what you may think of these kind of games, I guaranteed that if you get a few friends over any night of the week, maybe have a few beers as well (or if you're my friends, a few too many beers), then suggest firing up a game of Rock Band, I guarantee you a good time. Even SingStar (which for some reason, seems to always avoid the "music games are stale" argument, despite being largely unchanged for years).

despite appearances, every single person in this photo is EXTREMELY drunk

So, assuming still that these games are starting to go stale, we need to ask: where to now? Innovation in regards to gameplay is starting to seemingly hit a bit of a deadend, but still, most of the latest titles have made even minor improvements to gameplay.

Rock Band 3 has introduced the keyboard to it's line-up, and tuned the guitar part to make available a Pro-Guitar, which means that most people who can actually play a real guitar will be able to join in, and those that maybe want to try playing a real guitar have had that gap closed just a little bit more - and the same applies to the Pro-Drums. But beyond that, that's pretty much as far as they can go - they've covered the main instruments, and finely tuned the instruments already there. But that's okay. I don't think we need a Rock Band 4 for at least another year, if not longer.

Guitar Hero's main problem in the past was that it was trying to be Rock Band - they released Band Hero which was aimed more to be family friendly, but honestly, the soundtrack was a little lost, and while it did introduce some gameplay mechanics that are still in the new titles, the whole game just didn't seem to know what it wanted to be. Activision obviously quickly realised this, and have now got back to their rock and metal roots, and given it back that over-the-top cartoonish feel, and they're now all the better for it. Plus, for those that have been buying all the titles, their import function now means that they have a pretty impressive soundtrack to pick from, even in case where your little sister wants to play a Taylor Swift song.

DJ Hero has the most expanding to do, but that's only because it's the new kid on the block. DJ Hero 2 has ditched the guitar implementation, which is great, and it certainly seems to have more pure dance tracks than hiphop, which is, well, you can decide whether or not that's a good thing. They've made the 2-player game slightly more improved, and there certainly seems to be a lot more potential here than people originally gave credit for.

So, given that gameplay innovation isn't really the issue, the question still remains: where to now? Just like a lot of other forms of media, the same primary rule applies to video games: content is king. I believe that it's this content and how it's handled, will be the secret to any music game's success.

Guitar Hero has never been good at DLC. They never seem to release with any real regularity and for some frustrating reason, they stick to the "track pack" form of delivery. Now this pisses me off more than anything when it comes to music DLC. More often than not, they'll release a track-pack containing 3 songs that usually goes something like this:

1. The first track is awesome and is the main reason why you're interested in making the purchase,
2. The second song is okay but I can take it or leave it,
3. The third track is either one you'll hate, or it's a song you've never heard of.

Now you could say "but what would Activision care? They've got your money anyway", but sadly, this isn't always the truth. Many times I've not made the purchase because I didn't see the value for forking out 480MSP for one song. It's only now that they're starting to learn this - with WOR finally having individual tracks available for purchase on the new Soundgarden DLC. However, I'm still not convinced that they will stop the 'track pack' style of purchases. Even it's dance cousin, DJ Hero, also suffered badly with very limited DLC options, so it's yet to be seen whether or not DJ Hero 2 will be any different.

Rock Band seem to have the DLC thing down pat. They have a great range of music - unlike Guitar Hero's underlying need to have guitar-driven tracks, Rock Band dominates with it's range of not just bands, but music styles. Rock Band have regular DLC releases, advertised well, and a large range of full albums available for download.

However, Rock Band still aren't perfect. Their biggest downfall - which is also shared by Guitar Hero - is the truly limited bands that they source their material from. If video-games have taught us anything, it's that there's only about 30 bands in the entire world, which as you know is total bollocks. It's fine if you're American, because the majority of your favourite bands are probably already covered here, but that doesn't always work for the rest of the world. Rock Band almost had this problem sorted with the introduction of their Rock Band Network at the start of the year.

RBN made their developer kits available to the public (provided that "the public" have a high level of coding experience) so that relatively any band could sell their music through Rock Band without the usual contracts and licensing that official on-disc tracks go through. This was going to be a boon for indie artists and other local artists that wouldn't normally get the attention. It's been over 6 months since it's launch, you could debate that, depending on your music tastes, the catalogue so far is lacking in depth. But you know what? That doesn't matter for us Aussies, because it's not available in Australia! And this brings me to my main (if somewhat rambling) answer...

Given that I've only lived in Australia for an extended period of time, I can only speak of Australia, but if there's one thing I do know about our music scene it's that it's incredibly insular. There are bands that we've all grown up with over the years, that I just can't imagine my childhood without listening to certain albums, yet for most people outside of Australia, they've never heard them. It pains me that a market like we have, that nobody is capitalising on what is so painfully and obviously (at least to me) lacking. Sure, if you're wanting to make big profits, we don't have the population to bring the sales figures that a specialised target like The Beatles Rock Band brought in, but with just a few months development time, tell me your Aussie heart wouldn't beat with extra pride to walk in to your local games store and see this on the shelf:

You can't tell me this game wouldn't sell like hot-cakes

Obviously this is something I mocked up myself in Photoshop, but you get the idea. Take a band like Powderfinger, look at their record sales over the last few years and tell me that it's a bad idea. It doesn't need the full Beatles Rock Band treatment - hell, at this stage I'd be happy with just some DLC. Yes, okay, so Australian bands aren't totally left in the dark - we have had the odd Silverchair, Wolfmother and Living End tracks pop up now and again, but what I wouldn't give to be able to download You Am I's entire Hourly Daily album, or Shihad's General Electric, or even a 'best of' from Cold Chisel. Even DJ Hero could benefit from some terrific local dance acts - imagine being able to mix in the last Presets track with some old school TISM songs, followed by a mix-up with Empire Of The Sun with some Avalanches. Australia has some freakin' amazing musical talent, yet nobody seems to be capitalising on it.

Now, I can't claim to know how the games developer industry works exactly, but I can't help but feel that it'd be an obvious choice to have local developers working on some local content. It seems that in the past, Australian devs have been treated like some third-world developer (at least from some of the more major international developers), being kicked the projects that their main dev houses haven't had the time to do, but if you could sell a game like Rock Band Powderfinger, and be able to promote it is "a locally made game about a locally made band", surely that can only equal more sales. I'd even settle for an "ARIA DLC Pack" if it meant that they could help pump a few dollars to the project.

So, it seems that the "where to now" answer can be only be answered with: content. Innovation seems to be exhausted at this point for most band-based games - but it's important to remember it's okay for the answer to be "nowhere", because in my opinion, it's fine how it is. I'm happy with the gameplay and would be quite happy to not see it change. At the end of the day, I just wanna play along to my favourite song, but I just want a better choice of what these songs are.