Activision: Guitar Hero Stealing Rock Band Retail Market Share in US, Europe

May 7, 2009 2:34 PM

During a conference call for investors, Activision announced that its Guitar Hero franchise of rhythm games was making significant gains on EA and Harmonix' Rock Band at retail.

CEO Bobby Kotick said of Rock Band: "We've seen a rather precipitous falloff of that franchise." "We ended the quarter with a 55% share of all rhythm and music-based games in North America and Europe, up 10 full points from the prior year as we took share from Rock Band in both North America and Europe," added Activision publishing boss Mike Griffith.

"In the US and Europe, the Guitar Hero franchise was the number one best-selling third-party franchise overall [this quarter]," he said.

Griffith noted that Guitar Hero is outselling Rock Band at a ratio of ten-to-one in Europe.

Harmonix has already announced that the company would not be releasing a Rock Band sequel in 2009, and is instead looking to focus on sales of track downloads.

Alice O'Connor and Nick Breckon

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hillemania

 reply
May 7, 2009 2:58 PM

I would love to know how much money Rock Band is bringing in with DLC. Considering that tracks cost less to develop per $1 earned they might be doing well.
- Schnapple
  
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  May 7, 2009 3:17 PM
  
  Yeah that's what darted out to me - of course they're stealing the Retail market - they have like 4x the amount of retail titles whereas RB2 seems more like a platform to sell DLC for.
  
  All the more ironic though that Shackers tend to detest DLC on principle, unless it's for RB2
- [deleted] 1245268833
  
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  May 7, 2009 3:25 PM
  
  [deleted]
- [deleted] 716648330
  
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  May 7, 2009 3:38 PM
  
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  - deadhorse
    
     reply
    May 7, 2009 3:49 PM
    
    You can play these games online?
  - shredomatic
    
     reply
    May 7, 2009 4:03 PM
    
    I think the whole point is to have your friends over and play.
    
    As a band.
    
    A "Rock Band", if you will.
  - tbradshaw
    
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    May 7, 2009 6:46 PM
    
    "They need to have some sort of deal where only one person needs the song to play it online."
    
    Heh heh, think about that for a second. You mean the other consoles should somehow play the song without having it?
  - katchow
    
     reply
    May 8, 2009 6:02 AM
    
    I agree. It'd be nice if to find others with the same DLC. My friends are rarely able to come over and play RB. I still buy DLC but it holds less value having to play alone.
  - matrixneo42
    
     reply
    May 8, 2009 6:26 AM
    
    Doesn't matter as much if you have enough people around you in person to play it with. My wife and best friend and I play it all the time.
  - hillemania
    
     reply
    May 11, 2009 8:32 AM
    
    I can understand that, however for the most part, all the people I know that play RB have people over to their house. That's what I find most entertaining about it, everybody being a goofball in the same room.
    It's kinda a sticky situation though, if there were no DLC, then you'd just have to buy big packs of songs or entirely new games, and that would probably piss people off too.
    I'm really curious to know when the genre is going to scale back though. I went to the midnight release of GH3 and there were about 60 people in line, for the midnight release of GHWT there were 10.