Rock Band 4 for PC falls short of crowdfunding goal
Harmonix has been dealt a crowdfunding setback in an attempt to bring one of its previous franchises back to life.
Harmonix is now 1-1 in its attempts to get funding for different versions of its previous franchises. First, it was successful on Kickstarter in bringing the PlayStation 2 hit Amplitude back for PS3 and PS4. However, this time, an attempt to bring Rock Band 4 to PC fell woefully short on crowdfunding site Fig.
The company was seeking $1.5 million for the new platform, but only managed to bring in $792,817 by the time the funding window closed late last night. The company addressed the failure of the campaign in a final post to backers, thanking all the supporters, while also announcing what it hoped to do next.
"How do we feel about the end of the campaign? Disappointed, obviously," the team said in the post. "There’s no shortage of people at Harmonix who love Rock Band, and some of us got extra excited at the prospect of bringing back RBN, and even more about getting the chance to expose RB to a brand new audience.
"But at the same time we learned exactly what we needed to learn: there doesn’t seem to be enough of an audience to make Rock Band for PC a viable project for us right now. We're committed to supporting and improving RB4 on consoles. To be clear, we raised nearly $800,000 via backers and investors; it's an impressive showing of support from our community and for our brand. But as an independent developer we have to be careful about how much money and development time we risk on a project we’re not sure has a big enough audience, and crowdfunding allowed us to (among other things) judge the market fit for Rock Band PC."
There were 32 backers who chose to give to the $1,000 and $2500 tiers, but Harmonix failed to get anyone to bite on the upper tiers that capped at $25,000.
The team sad they had a lot of investors interested and may revisit a PC port later on. "It's certainly in the realm of possibility that we might try again in the future, or find another path to get Rock Band for PC made. We love the PC as a platform, and we're excited by the possibilities and freedom it allows for User Generated Content, but right now we don't have any specific plans to make it happen."
The timing of the end of the Rock Band 4 campagin is interesting as Harmonix was also supposed to ship PS3 codes for Amplitude to backers yesterday, but a snafu sent out PS4 codes. The PS4 version was released in January, and Harmonix is working to get the correct codes out.
-
John Keefer posted a new article, Rock Band 4 for PC falls short of crowdfunding goal