The revenue distance between a $180 Rock Band bundle, a $100 Guitar Hero bundle, and a $60 game accounts for a huge portion of this drop, even without market saturation driving away any existing customers. Plus, Rock Band 3's main selling points involve new accessories to their own hardware, constraining the audience further.

I wouldn't give up on the public's ability to smell quality. Activision can pay to market crap down their throats quickly, But nothing beats the slow spread of quality word of mouth (which I'm now convinced Pro Guitar will elicit). I think it's sad that right now, when Rock Band3 needs a strong marketing push, they're being dumped.



* I enjoyed the bundled keytar enough to feel Rock Band3 was something new and worthy. Played "normal" mode once before trying out Pro keys, and will never go back.



* Last night I received my "pro guitar", and : found it was astonishing. Again, I will never go back.



Played through the first 5 "goals" in Rock Band3 with it. Transformed me from kind of afraid and flustered (just as I was years back with the first Rock Band guitar), to thrilled and grinning as I completed beloved songs on ProEasy (white stripes and faith no more, ftw!).



It's really a perfect "real-guitar" tutor (I think real world guitar training, via tutor or DVD, is infinitely worse actually, because they're so boring and usually locked to one style.).

I'm convinced this will move me towards my fantasy of learning to play music on a real guitar. (so that's priceless?)



- My girlfriend balked at the number of buttons (102), and claimed she'd never touch it. Then I reminded her that it doubles as a bass guitar trainer (which she's fantasized about learning), and I could see that she's hooked. (We have an electric guitar and bass sitting on stands in our living room, each next to its amp- just gathering dust each month. because good tabs are hard to find online, and because it's such a huge un-fun learning curve. Until now?)



- I'd complain that this week's "mustang" Pro Guitar is actually harder than a normal guitar, due to its uniform squishy fret buttons (Harder to tell if my fingers on the same "string"). So while I dig it, they can definitely improve on it...



- I now plan to buy a second RB3 Pro guitar (for girlfriend at least). And I see that the upcoming fender strat will be an actual stringed guitar which I can go plug into an amp. And will cost less than a brand new real guitar.



So... A really amazing value proposition/progression innovation. Currently about halfway through playing itself out. I don't see the value in projecting it's failure based on Activision's market flooding. !!!



(* to be fair, I was also impressed with the DJ hero investment. fun game, and unique quality peripheral. But I only had to pay 20 bucks to pick it up, and don't yet plan to get the sequel. sooo. a confused example?)

i think this analysis tells a lot about public perception. True, innovation can spark a boost in interest but there's a difference between innovation for entertainment purposes and that of business need. There a lot of other factors which I'm sure Gamasutra's analyst Matt Matthews took into consideration... such as taking into account that a pro guitar is going to be upwards of $150 and a midi fender strat, albet squier, is going to be at least $300. that alone lessens the accessibility of the game and in a down economy increases this effect.

I'm sorry but Guitar Hero 3 was considered the best of all the games by many people and Harmonix didn't even work on it. It's also by far the best selling of the bunch, selling well over 15 million copies. Your analysis just wouldn't hold any water...of course maybe what you mean is "are Harmonix as a company improving sales?"



Well I can't do a full analysis but here is a quick analysis:



Rock Band 1 (360): week 1: 223,586, week 10: 896,574

Rock Band 2 (360): week 1: 347,802, week 10: 855,455

Rock Band 3 (360): week 1: 117,888



(all values are estimates only, from VGChartz)



From this small sample I would guess (with only a small percentage of certainty of course) that rock band games are becoming increasingly front loaded, and furthermore that sales of the most recent edition are very depressed.

Very good points.

Read the last paragraph again, please. It addresses full-year sales.

I did:

"While the figures above are only for the January – October period, we can at least give full-year figures for 2008 and 2009," Matthews continues. "The total haul for music games in 2008 was over $1.6 billion. That dropped to over $870 million in 2009. Short of a Christmas miracle, music games won't break $400 million for all of 2010."



However, I don't agree with the final analysis, given the two factors I listed above:

1) at least 5 newly released music game titles + hardware: RB3, GH6, DJH, Dance Central, Just Dance 2

2) Christmas is reported as accounting for 35-44% of annual sales)



With the chart indicating Jan-Oct sales of approx. £200 million, point 2) alone implies a range of $307 - $357 million. Throw point 1) into the mix, and $400 million looks like a reasonable expectation, not a miracle!



Admittedly, anything above that (e.g. $600 million) will be a stretch...

Last year saw sales of BRB, GH5, DJH1. Those were huge releases, heavily promoted, especially BRB which had an extremely high average price. This year we have basically the same release slate, less promotion, lower initial sales, and lower average prices.



Yet we should expect sales in Nov - Dec should more than double sales in Jan - Oct? You can look at absolute figures all you want, but the ratios of the past couple of years don't bear out your hypothesis. I'll be happy to be wrong.



Dance Central is the only new title and its sales are naturally limited by Kinect sales. (Not that Kinect won't sell, but that you can't expect 2 million copies to sell when there aren't 2 million potential owners.)

Matt,



We may end up having to agree to disagree - and we'll find out one way or another in January. But I think my logic is fairly solid :)



To recap: Nintendo are on record as saying their Christmas software sales equate to 44% of their annual sales. There's a number of parallels between the music-game industry and Nintendo's more popular"casual" merchandise: both tend to involve peripherals, both make good presents and both tend towards social-gaming. All told, it doesn't seem unreasonable to take Nintendo's figures and apply them to the music-game industry.



Secondly, having done a bit of digging: the majority of music games are released in September/October timeframes (RB3: Oct 26; GH6: Sept 29; JD2: Oct 12). As such, they've had minimal impact on the year-to-date sales.



Thirdly, a look at the figures for the Xbox 360 on vgchartz (with the usual pinch of salt) indicates that the sales follow the usual pattern: after Christmas, the sales tail off drastically. For instance:



Rock Band 2: released September 14th: 350,000 sales in Christmas period (approx 30% of total sales)

BRB: released September 9th; 460,000 sales in Christmas period (approx. 50% of total sales)

Guitar Hero WT: released October 26: 1,000,000 sales in Christmas period (approx. 60% of total sales)



Finally: there's also a fair number of new music games which have just been released on the Wii: Just Dance 2; Michael Jackson Experience, Glee Kareoke Experience - in particular, amazon.com shows Just Dance 2 to be the most wished for item and the most gifted; it's also currently #2 in the Wii sales chart and it's dragged the original Just Dance back up to #16 in the charts.



All told (assuming these kareoke-style games count as music games), there's likely to be a significant amount of revenue coming from the Wii alone...



But anyway. We'll find out come January!

ha have fun selling harp hero!

It would be totally awesome XD



Also trumpet hero!



Or... theremin hero! ok, not this one, it would be TOO hard, I mean like Contra squared hard.

I agree. I enjoyed playing Rock Band at parties, but now the plastic instruments collect dust just like the Wii. And like the Kinect will.



The music game thing was a fad to 90% of its audience. Like other fads, this one will collapse down to 10% of its height.