The business of music games is unsustainable and it’s not really because of the high price of devices or sort of shrinkage of the market. It’s because dealing with music –I mean rights to use it and so worth- is insane, truly insane.
Axl Rose is suing Activision even though I’m sure that the publisher legal/licensing lawyer team did everything they could so that it doesn’t happen. Fail. Not that they’re not qualified but because it’s pure madness and that at the end, the artist/rights owner has the last word.
Rock Band is facing that too. You would have thought that Rock Band 3 track list would be amazing when it’s actually quite limited. The Beatles Rock Band has been an insane amount of work for just one fucking band. And it didn’t even sell well despite one of the biggest marketing campaign ever for a game.
Dance Central has the same problem. If they want to get Michael/Janet Jackson stuff which are kind of the Beatles of dance, Harmonix will have to work not on the game but on legal issues and boring stuff like that. I bet the Jackson family is no joke to deal with.
The only thing they could do would be to use music people don’t know. You know, really go out there and discovering good songs and bands but of course, it’s hard AND people want to play songs they love. But in terms of rights, it would be much more easier to make deals. But maybe the gameplay is not that deep and really requires the “Look! I am so Slash with my plastic axe” to achieve pleasure.
But in general the music business is unbelievable.
Why the more user threatening region locked online services are always about music? Look at Spotify, losing money despite a business model and revenues. Why the music business is so paranoid and never respected its customers since people stopped buying vinyls? They sue people downloading music, customers for millions of dollars. They screw any streaming service with licensing fees, one by one. A decade after the p2p revolution, they still do it despite that it absolutely fails to stop anything.
They screamed with the tape recording thing and then fucked us hard with insane CDs prices (cost of CD always has been extremely low for them).
They screamed with Napster and then fucked us hard with insane file prices (cost of mp3 storage, hahahahaha).
The music business is just greedy as hell and deserves to bleed. Natural selection style.
Then probably music games will come back, stronger than ever. Because Music is one of the most intense play in Life.