Neversoft Doesn’t Get It, It’s the Music That Sells The Game

By Joe Haygood | August 28, 2008

Yesterday, it was announced that Guitar Hero World Tour had secured exclusive content in regards to the equipment you can buy in-game, and locations that you can play in over time.  All this is nice, but at the end of the day, it is not the equipment my people use in the game, but the music that you play that seems to matter the most in these games.

If you look at the lineups, both have a great starting set of tracks to play, and that is really cool, but beyond that what do we know?  Guitar Hero has always been a mystery commodity when it comes to downloadable music for the GH games.  Guitar Hero 2 had about four to five music downloads, and most of them were tracks from the first Guitar Hero.  Guitar Hero III started off very slow with add-on tracks, but has picked up as of late, but it still can be a month or more between music downloads.

Rock Band has been giving players music every week, since a month after launch, and now is offering full albums on a monthly basis.  It has become an event to announce the new music coming out for Rock Band.  As a matter of fact, articles on blogs, including this one, look for track pack leaks to release about Rock Band.  In the end, we the consumer, are looking at having almost 300 songs at launch.  Maybe more, as that is just calculating what is in my song inventory, plus the new game tracks.   And this onslaught of music is to continue each week, ad-nauseum.

Neversoft has yet to announce what they are going to do with downloadable content.  They have mentioned it will get regular, new content, but nothing specific.  We, as gamers, need to know what is going to happen with added music to Guitar Hero World Tour, becuase it expands the play of the game, with new music to learn and master each week.  Without knowing a regular schedule of downloads, and an estimated cost, it just seems like it will be difficult to hand over money to Neversoft and Activision, knowing that your Rock Band Library will grow on a regular basis.

Neversoft is slowly grasping the concept of music downloads and their importance, with the announced Metallica album download, as well as allowing DLC for the Wii, but if you are going to only get that content every six weeks, will that added support really matter at the end of the day?