TiesMorskate.nl » guitar hero

Viacom sells Harmonix – now independent

Ties — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 21:54:05 +0000

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.

Music Game Sales dropped 80% over 2 years

Ties — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 15:19:55 +0000

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?

Harmonix to be sold by Viacom

Ties — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 18:17:04 +0000

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:

Viacom also announced that it plans to sell Harmonix, which developed the Rock Band music video game franchise.

Accordingly, the Company reclassified the business as a discontinued operation and has recast its results from

previous periods to reflect this change.

This is a reflection of the claims that ‘the consumer is sick of rythm games‘ and it seems Viacom is accepting it for a fact. This leaves one of the two major rythm games up for grabs, publishers looking to compete directly with Activisions Guitar Hero, the game which the Harmonix crew originally developed, can probably pick Harmonix up at a bargain since Viacom already cast it off as ‘discontinued’ in its report.

I’m going to keep a close eye to what’s going to happen!

Activision Blizzard will pass by consoles

Ties — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 19:47:53 +0000

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!

Aside from hinting on a day that players’ Facebook profiles will be integrated in Guitar Hero, he also expected many of his now console based games to be playable independent of a console!

“I think what the untethered Guitar Hero does is equal the playing field a little more and give you some leverage with first parties when it comes to downloadable content and the business model,”

So aside from integrating all his PC games into one platform (Battle.net 2.0) he will also be able to bring games to your living room regardless of your ownership of one of the consoles. The argument he makes for this is that he hasn’t seen any plans of any new console, so it must be more than 2 years away for new consoles to be launched, allowing him to explore all the options the current hardware environment has to give.