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Declining interest in music games set to continue
Author: Joe MartinPublished: 26th October 2009
Declining interest in music games is set to continue, warn analysts who point to DJ Hero as an early casualty.
The main reason for the slowing sales is the high price of equipment-heavy games, said Cowan and Company's Doug Creutz in a comment to GI.biz, as well as the fading buzz over the Guitar Hero franchise.
Activision's new deck-based music game, DJ Hero, is set to be an early casualty according to Creutz, who says that demand for the title is well below expectations and that the title may struggle to even be a modest success.
"On DJ Hero, despite some recent positive comments from company management about pre-orders, we remain very cautious about the title's prospects at launch," said Creutz.
"A survey of online retailers indicates a demand profile that is well below what we would have expected to see just a few days before launch for a title that was destined to be a big (or even modest) success."
Creutz has since slashed expected sales for DJ Hero by more than one million customers in the fourth quarter, bringing full year sales down from an ambitious 2.5 million to just 950,000. Ouch!
"We probably underestimated the extent to which the 2007-08 peak in Guitar Hero unit sales was driven by the extreme amount of buzz around the product,” offered Creutz. “In retrospect Guitar Hero III likely attracted a lot of one-time buyers (that have not returned for subsequent franchise instalments) due to its 'it-game' status at the time."
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I'd much rather sit down and listen to the album than fail to play some freakishly complex button sequence - Jordan by Buckethead sounds much better when you're not failing it miserably on GHII!
DJ hero....turntable, utter fail. At least Rock Band and Guitar Hero had some good tracks.
have they forgotten the saying "out with the old, in with the new" ? doo'h
I'm pretty happy with Rock Band 2, and as long as they keep making the tracks in the various Lego games exportable to play in the main game, then I'll keep buying them :)
QFT!
+rep
Every time something doesn't go their way it's "oh well this type of game is ruining this, or people pirating are ruining this, or the decline in this type of game is down to the giant squid being particularly active this year" I just scream at my monitor "Make ****ing better games and people will ****ing buy them, its not ****ing rocket ****ing sci-****ing-e-****ing-nce!!!!!!!"
And made SC and MW2 like what it's going to be.
as for all the **** hero games ... meh. i got a real guitar with actual strings. i know a chord or 300. even got one of them things with 2 less strings and no frets.
i wouldnt mind having one of them drum thingies to teach my daughter on, but i can pick up a usb cheapie from tha intarwebs for a twenty ... so once again, meh.
That game has been quite possibly my best purchase on Steam to date. For the amount of play time I've had out of it, the £6 I paid really does seem like nothing at all.
Even after nearly 6 months, the appeal has not diminished - every now and then I find myself listening to a particular track and thinking: "this would be brilliant in Audiosurf!"
It's a shame I was hoping it would be a good little midi controller (or hackable into one) so that I could use it in my DJayin gigs for some laughs.
Yeah it's easy to see why, aging rock dinosaurs wanting to sell old tracks = yes, cutting edge dance acts diluting their products with a console game = no. If you want to DJ I recomend ableton live or native instruments traktor.
Ugh, it's a game, you don't moan at people who love playing CoD4 to go join the army do you?
plus ****ing one.
Why not go download Audacity for free, and go make some music in it? It's free, and you can actually make a remix or something, rather than just pressing buttons in a stupid game.
Both myself and my eldest daughter have bought real (acoustic) guitars purely on the basis we enjoyed guitar hero. She is doing quite well but I am terrible :(
I wanted to play a game and have a laugh with my friends like you do with guitar hero, but with something that more reflected my musical taste.
Quite behind the times aren't you? this is like one of many FPS based sims the military has going and is used as a recruitment tool.
Like seriously, you don't think that there's a generation of teens sitting around going 'man this FPS stuff is cool, but i want to get my hands on some real guns, yuck yuck, and go kill me some ****' and then head on down to the local recruitment office?
At least with GH maybe we might garner some interest in the arts again. . .
Presuming that Guitar Hero is an individuals 'introduction' to music, or playing music, I will heartily applaud anyone who wants to have a go at making music themselves, using real instruments. Five buttons and a strummer are not the same as six strings, dozens of fret positions, subtleties like harmonics, or the fact that there are dozens of other instruments out there.
I was hoping that people who had played Guitar Hero had enjoyed their taster to the point where they stepped out of gaming and moved into something that can become another hobby, a career, a lifetimes passion. Anyone who picks up an instrument to learn gains the ability to create new music themselves - the ability to evoke warmth, chill, love, hate, joy, anguish and a whole host of other emotions in those who listen to their work.
I suffered through British secondary school music lessons in a school that obviously didn't give one whit about music - the lesson consisted of a bored teacher (who wasn't even a musician) telling us to each sit behind a Casio electronic keyboard, put the headphones on and keep quiet while she got on with some marking. In terms of learning about music, I'm sure even Guitar Hero is better than that...
Are you really to say that you'd not like to hear of someone, in the not too distant future, who stands up and says, "I got interested in playing music because of a computer game"?
Hear, hear! ;)
I also had the same monotonous experience with school music lessons. I did however get an acoustic guitar when I was about 14, but the only lessons I could get were during my lunchtime at school. At 14 years old, I would have rather been outside with my friends, so I only ended up going to two lessons. Over 13 years later, I now want to actually buy a real guitar and start learning properly again. I just don't have the cash to invest at the moment!