Life after Guitar Hero: what’s next for music gaming?

18 February 2011

by Eamonn Ford

As reported last week, Guitar Hero – once heralded as the salvation of record labels looking to revive creaking catalogues and push new artists – has been axed by makers Activision after six years on the world stage.

The news, combined with the fact that rival games publisher Harmonix (creator of rival music brand, Rock Band) was offloaded by Viacom at the end to VC firm Columbus Nova amid concerns about its economic viability, sends out a very clear message that the glory days of music-based console gaming is over.

So what went wrong? The simple answer is that the cost of entry was too high (the game itself and the instrument-shaped plastic controllers gamers) for the games to be truly mainstream. Plus the market was flooded far too quickly and too frequently, with multiple titles in the Rock Band and Guitar Hero/DJ Hero franchises being released in the same year.

Yet beyond this is a new trend suggesting that technology has simply shunted the market along.

Ultimately, the fact that the two marquee brands in music console gaming (Guitar Hero and Rock Band) are hitting the wall does not mean that the gaming and music honeymoon has turned into a bitter resentment and looming divorce. Singing games (SingStar, Lips, X Factor) and dancing titles (Just Dance, Dance Dance Revolution, Michael Jackson: The Experience) still do respectable business and the new motion-based technology of Xbox Kinect and Sony Move hint at a whole new gaming categories to come.

The big boom, however, really lies within social gaming and mobile apps.

While the likes of first-person shooter game Call Of Duty sell in jaw-dropping quantities, social gaming has a staggering reach, and music can and should be part of this explosion. Facebook had 500 million users at the end of 2010 with 200 million of them playing social games every month. The most popular title was Farmville, but other music-based games (notably Music Pets, Nightclub City and SongHi) are coming through.

Free to access, these games make their money through the sale of virtual goods. Indeed, eMarketer recently forecast that social gaming revenues will grow from $856 million [A$853m] in 2010 to $1 billion [A$1bn] this year.

On the mobile side, the runaway success of Tap Tap Revenge on the iPhone (and soon Android) was such that Disney snapped up its publisher, Tapulous, last year.

Console gaming may be sprawling, punch-drunk, on the canvas, but social gaming and mobile games are only just limbering up.