Guitar Hero makes download revenue interesting

In an interview with Gamingindustry.biz, Guitar Hero CEO Dan Rosensweig elaborates on one of the biggest IP’s in the business and its latest installment; Guitar Hero 5. Most worth noting is the fact that he considers the download revenue entering the ‘interesting’ level by each month being record-breaking over the last.He continues to say that while a few years ago, when the franchise just started, a connected experience wasn’t all that relevant, this has turned for the current generation of games. Also, just the Xbox being really connected limited the consumer base for download sales. But because all the major parties have now really opened up towards on connectivity the market place really opens up.

“We have a really exciting slate, including five Rolling Stones songs, and we just see a constant rise in the percentage of our users that are connected to the internet, the percentage that are playing online, and the percentage that are downloading music – it just keeps getting bigger and bigger.”

More importantly, the latest installment has backward compatibility, allowing users to bring over songs they’ve already downloaded and paid for, and enables them to play these songs in the new game.

He touches on the software/hardware sales split by saying that a new franchise will see a 50/50 divide between both, DJ Hero being a prime example, but with Guitar Hero they keep seeing more solid software sales because of the established user base.

Guitar Hero 5 sold more copies than any other Guitar Hero on launch, beating Beatles Rock Band and clearly building on its bigger following because of the difference in marketing activities for both games; Beatles Rock Band saw enormous marketing efforts being made, linked to the Beatles releasing their box set simultaneously.

When linked to the comment of Activision’s CEO about passing the consoles by releasing a fully functioning gaming product, he clearly had Guitar Hero in mind. With this success they have once again shown the branding value of this franchise.