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As I already mentioned in an earlier post, Viacom planned to sell Harmonix, they finally managed to do so by selling to investment firm Columbus Nova, effectively making Harmonix an independent developer. The developer is well-known for its Rock Band franchise which it developed together with MTV (another Viacom property). Reason for the sale is the poor performance of the music genre, which still is estimated at 400 million dollar.

Gameindustry.biz provides a nice quote from Harmonix concerning their past 4 years as a part of Viacom:

“Viacom and MTV Networks have been an amazing home for us over the past four years. It’s where we launched both Rock Band and Dance Central, worked with The Beatles, Green Day, AC/DC, The Who and thousands of other artists. We want to take a moment to thank everyone in that organisation who helped make these awesome games possible.”

With only unannounced projects and some DLC for Rock Band it is hard to say whether the chances for Harmonix look bright, but a company that basically single-handedly grew the music genre to great hights (they developed Guitar Hero for Activision) should not be questioned if they can make a proper game.

The $65 million reported loss of last year is quite possibly the result of over-investment in the Beatles property, of which the rights only are reported to have cost Viacom 50 million. Viacom furthermore adding that they lack scale and expertise to properly work the console game business. No price has been called, so maybe that will come up in the future, it probably won’t be near the 175 million dollars Viacom paid for the developer.

In the post on Viacom selling Harmonix from last week I already mentioned Reuters calling the consumer ‘sick of rythm games’ and now Gamasutra publishes NPD group’s report on the US game retail industry saying music games went through a fivefold drop in just 2 years. The quite recent genre was positioned to be one of the major players on the gaming stage for some time to come, sadly, it turned out to be a hype. Maybe in a few years it’ll steady itself but for the years to come music game sales will probably be around 500 million in the US (1.6 billion in 2008). What’s the next hype to come along?

Viacom, owner of the MTV brand and paramount pictures to name but a few of its major brands, is planning to sell one of its gaming assets; Harmonix. The developer of the famous title Rock Band clearly states in its quarterly report that:

I already wrote about Activision Blizzard and their new upcoming MMO, but they have even more ideas to share. How about a future without consoles? They do acknowledge the fact that consoles are a big part of the business, but services like OnLive make a console-less future very possible! (more…)