Harmonix talks Rock Band 3 sales, future games, Guitar Hero situation, Wii as an important platform

A portion of an EDGE interview with Harmonix’s Alex Rigopulos…

E: How do you regard the sales of Rock Band 3?

AR: Well, there’s no denying that Rock Band 3 hasn’t yet sold to the level we hoped it would out of the gate. But on the flipside of that we also believe that it’s a product that has a lot of life. It’s an incredibly huge product with a lot of functionality that people haven’t experienced yet; a key peripheral, the Squier, is shipping next week. And we have long term plans to support the platform indefinitely. We have some really compelling content to come and we want to nurture the Pro functionality. So while the sales were somewhat disappointing, we have a lot of faith in its future potential. It’s also worth pointing out that there are a lot of people still playing Rock Band 2 who haven’t given 3 a try yet, and with the recent news about Guitar Hero there’s still a large addressable market we haven’t tapped into

E: Would you deviate from music games if a great idea required it?

AR: There’s a high degree of creative energy here right now about motion gaming. Historically our focus has been almost exclusively on music games. Dance Central is a bridge from music gaming into motion gaming, we’ve developed both a competency and preoccupation with the creative potential of motion gaming, and it’s safe to say you’ll see a lot more in that domain from Harmonix beyond Dance Central. We’d be absolutely be open-minded about that. I think there’s staggering creative potential that’s largely unexplored.

E: How poisonous was Activision’s update schedule for Guitar Hero?

AR: I think that when there’s commercial pressure, particularly in the context of a fierce market share battle, as you saw with Guitar Hero versus Rock Band, there’s enormous pressure to do yearly updates. Because the consequence of not doing one is potentially lost market share that you’ll never regain. It’s a pressure that can be counterproductive to the pace of innovation because you can only do so much when trying to support annual updates – or, in Activision’s case, what often amounted to much more frequently than annual.

E: You recently announced the end of Rock Band Network support for Wii. Has Wii support generally become an albatross for Rock Band?

AR: Actually, it’s been a pretty important platform for Rock Band; a significant percentage of Rock Band consumers are on Wii. One of the reasons Wii was so explosively successful was that it brought into the world of console gaming a lot of people who didn’t consider themselves gamers. Similarly, Rock Band brought in a lot of people who didn’t consider themselves gamers. There’s a fascinating overlap there. The issue of support for Rock Band Network is really one that’s just related to some – I won’t bore you with the details – technical specifics of what was required to support RBN content on the platform compared to the actual appetite for it. It didn’t make sense so we had to make that call and be very direct about it.