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.

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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.

Contributing Editor
From The Chatty
  • reply
    April 6, 2016 9:29 AM

    John Keefer posted a new article, Rock Band 4 for PC falls short of crowdfunding goal

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      April 6, 2016 9:46 AM

      People didn't want to buy yet another set of plastic instruments? Shocker.

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      April 6, 2016 9:50 AM

      [deleted]

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      April 6, 2016 3:57 PM

      FYI Harmonix, It should not cost 1.5 million to port a game and implement steam workshop support, if you can't do it cheaper, you need better developers.

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        April 6, 2016 4:05 PM

        [deleted]

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        April 6, 2016 4:10 PM

        [deleted]

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        April 6, 2016 9:10 PM

        Game development costs money, especially because they weren't just adding support for the workshop, they were recreating the Rock Band Network.

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        April 6, 2016 11:58 PM

        1.5 million barely covers like 5 experienced devs, a qa person or two, admin overhead, office overhead, music licensing overhead for a year. you have no idea about the subject matter you are discussing.

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      April 6, 2016 4:06 PM

      [deleted]

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      April 6, 2016 4:13 PM

      This was dead in the water when they said that your previous purchases wouldn't carry over. I know that there's not much they could have done to fix that, but still.

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      April 6, 2016 4:25 PM

      the team sad. :(

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      April 6, 2016 6:09 PM

      The console versions didn't do well. So I don't know what they were expecting. This is certainly the type of game that's a better experience in front of a tv, not on your PC.

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      April 6, 2016 6:18 PM

      No good. The whole thing seemed tone deaf from the start.

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      April 6, 2016 9:01 PM

      There is still no practice mode on the console versions :(

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      April 6, 2016 9:11 PM

      I WAS EXCITED FOR THIS! Sure, it would have been great to have a PC version much earlier than now but BETTER LATE THAN NEVER!

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      June 3, 2016 10:29 AM

      RB4 didn't do anything fundamentally different than RB3. It also required to purcahse the new instruments if you didn't have a certain newer model. No one is going to buy $300 of these instruments again

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