The costs of producing the games are pretty high...
When the games started out, they were all covers... It wasn't until the series started getting hot that they put the original artists on. That shit gets expensive. So you need to keep the sales volume high in order to make money.
The model also depends on hardware sales. People will only buy so many instruments.
High production costs? - no actually the production budgets including master recording still were lower compared to other game dev budgets. We actually had broken open the model on how someone could earn in games. Activision simply got too greedy and they just squeezed out everyone else and ruined a delicate balance of it all... It's complicated but I wouldn't point the finger straight at budgets. Budgets can be controlled. GH1 for PS2 had an insanely low budget for a PS2 game.
Yes Hardware R&D and COGS factor into it. It's mostly the issue of inventory. Music games are the hardest games to control what inventory meets the actual sales needs because of the orders for controllers take 3 months to hit your shores. How do you guess how many units a market will absorb when you aren't even done with your game?
Again I will say, the delicate balance was thrown off. Ultimately they were trying to sustain a product line where they completely lost track of what made it good. They even went so far as alienate instrument makers to the point where they were coming up with their own ugly guitar designs.
What the heck is this? And how is that cool? The guitar is supposed to complete the illusion of you playing electric guitar... not break the illusion! How can you not "get that?"
Sorry to hear about your baby, but at least the releases you were involved with will go down in history as serious bench marks.
Thanks! I would give Harmonix much credit for that but part of me likes to believe that as the Exec Poducer for GH1-2, I knew what I was doing. In publishing we did more than just write checks and approve milestones.
RedOctane owners lied to us that they were not selling the company but heck, I got cashed out on my stock. I knew that ATVI was going to run it into the ground. It's obvious when their side had a HUGE rush of folks just trying to take over GH cause they wanted it simply on their resume. Their attitude was that they needed to "teach us how the big boys do things." I had worked there in the late 90's also. Ultimately all ATVI really knew how to do was write bigger checks.
The VP of marketing at RO once sat with all of us on our team (production and marketing) and asked us why we were better than the guys at ATVI and other publishers from entering this music game market. (even Konami) I was the only person to say anything to her. "because we get it"
Not to hijack the thread, but I would like to know why you favor rock band as the superior game.
I have heard arguments both ways, but I know you have an "in" with GH, since you helped develope the controller.
RB is more about the music. It's more fun. Actually the initial vision of the product was to incorporate the whole 3 piece instrument vision w/out vocals. We found that KRev didn't do anything that we wanted for the game. People don't know it by my first draft of a product vision to HMX was to have 3 instruments and no vocals. By GH2 I also wanted the games to have optional subtitles across the screen. It would have been a super "cheap" feature which would have added tremendous "party play" to the game without distracting the scoring and instrument play.
GH simply tried to be more hardcore and started doing little for entry level and intermediate level play. Rock Band also tried not to super saturate the market place w/ versions. They tried to balance that out with diligent support of DLC and specific software packs marketed toward audiences not DLC savy or for a platform that had difficulty supporting DLC (Wii.)
Band dynamics were also copied by GH. That was pretty lame. Neversoft tried to innovate but IMHO they never did anything really well. This was probably because they were always trying to give ATVI marketers something to bullet point on a box and argue apple to orange features instead of have a vision of where a product is going and completely support that vision with EVERYTHING they could put into the box.
Even all of the people left at RedOctane secretly started hating the GH products that they where shoveling and secretly were playing RB on their own time.
I stopped playing GH entirely after leaving. I have a hard time giving any support to ATVI products now. I don't own Starcraft 2 for this very reason. I'd stop in and try a few songs but ultimately felt like the note charts were souless and there was something always odd about what they were doing with the game. The DS version is a good example of this.
What happened is pretty simple.
Something came out of no where and was doing really well. GH was a game changer for the industry. It was the first music title to break out and compete against every other game genre in retail sales. They had to have it cause it was the only thing they could do to sustain even their goals, aquire something that seemed original and really balanced out their own portfolio of titles. Between shooters, Blizzard and TH; what else did they have?
They ran it into the ground applying their standard business practices. The budgets didn't match with product quality and sales volume... marketing was lame... sales went down year after year... SKUs competed for shelf space... and now they have a HUGE inventory of old product that they have to write off.
Its now all on hold, they wont touch it again untill they figure out how to sustain it and make money once again.
It's going to go the way of Zork...
*EDIT* Sorry to ramble. I probably have more to say on this topic than most that ever worked on GH because of my somewhat unique perspective. I was one of the first to quit actually. Most of this I've only shared with my closer friends as there's not much point in predicting or sharing about what has happened with GH. Most here wont care but I'm just trying to comment on a few things pointed out.