Edge Magazine Interviews Harmonix Boss Alex Rigopulos
Although we’re only two months in to 2011, it has already been a very interesting year. 2010 ended with Harmonix being sold from Viacom to investment firm Columbus Nova, and so far this year Harmonix has been hit with a round of layoffs, and Rock Band’s rival has recently announced they they are taking a permanent vacation from the rhythm gaming genre. While none of these are positive indicators of the future of the music games, Harmonix founder and CEO Alex Rigopulos talks with Edge Magazine about the future of the Rock Band franchise and Harmonix itself.
In the interview, Alex comments on the effect caused by releasing multiple title updates in a single year, and why it was necessary to keep up, to some extent, with a competitor that established such a rigorous pace. He continues on with some great points about strategic opportunities regarding the future of Rock Band now that Guitar Hero is taking a break. Alex finishes the interview by discussing how music games are now an important source of profits for the music industry, and while Harmonix may no longer be under MTV’s umbrella, it helped Harmonix gain the attention of the music industry, and now allows them the luxury of collaborating much more directly with some major players in the industry.
Head on over to Edge to check it out!
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Hmm so this is a newer interview than the one last year? Interesting!
Pretty interesting read. It was kind of comforting to hear that HMNX is planning on supporting the franchise for a long time to come. I liked that they brought up support for the Wii, and how he tried to sugar coat HMNX 100% supporting the Wii users. Even though I feel that HMNX would rather not have to worry about us Wii guys because all of the extra work that it takes to put stuff on our console. I’m not totally blaming HMNX because I know a good part is the difficulty of Nintendo.
This is good news for us Wii owners:
You recently announced the end of Rock Band Network support for Wii. Has Wii support generally become an albatross for Rock Band?
“Actually, it’s been a pretty important platform for Rock Band; a significant percentage of Rock Band consumers are on Wii. One of the reasons Wii was so explosively successful was that it brought into the world of console gaming a lot of people who didn’t consider themselves gamers. Similarly, Rock Band brought in a lot of people who didn’t consider themselves gamers. There’s a fascinating overlap there.”
Still disagree with the RBN issue (which he mentions). But as long as we get mainstream support, it’ll do.
RockBandAide Reply:
February 28th, 2011 at 1:07 pm
The RBN issue is not something you can “disagree” with. Not sure what people don’t seem to understand about this. Harmonix wasn’t making enough revenue from RBN sales on the Wii to cover the costs to migrate that same content on to the Wii. Why would Harmonix continue to migrate RBN content to the Wii if no one was buying it and Harmonix was losing money in the process?
Game!Ov3r Reply:
February 28th, 2011 at 2:38 pm
I still say that if they were more selective in the song choices to bring over, lets say give us the top 10 selling songs once a month would have been still nice. I believe a Evanescence or All That Remains would still sell well on the Wii over 90% of the stuff we were getting.
RockBandAide Reply:
February 28th, 2011 at 2:53 pm
I don’t think that would be unreasonable. I think it’s tough to justify how plausible this is without seeing the normal and RBN DLC sales numbers, which are obviously kept pretty close to the vest.
He is always so classy! I love interviews with him. He says his corporate spin, but I never feel lied to, just well taken care of.
Also, everything he said is good news. I can’t wait to see their new IP.
Noah
I recognize that jacket! XD