Posts Tagged ‘harmonix’

It seems like it has been awhile since we’ve given stuff away here on the site, so thanks to Harmonix, we’ve recently fallen in to a nice little cache of DLC codes for the Xbox 360 from the past year that we want to help give out. We’ll try to giveaway a different DLC pack each Friday until our stash runs out. First up is the Billy Joel Piano Challenge pack from last March. The songs included are…

• I Go to Extremes
• Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway)
• My Life
• Prelude/Angry Young Man *
• Scenes from an Italian Restaurant
• She’s Always a Woman

If this is something that you want to try and win, entry is simple. All you have to do is post a comment below that includes your favorite Rock Band song that has a keys/piano chart. Standard rules apply: one entry per household only, Xbox 360 only, codes are redeemable worldwide (as far as I know). Please include a valid email address (or Twitter account if you don’t want to take off your tin foil hat) with each entry so we can contact the winners.

We’ll let this run through the weekend so everyone has a chance to enter and randomly choose a winner sometime on Monday afternoon (Central time). And since we ALSO have a number of 160 MSP codes, we’ll even randomly give out a “consolation gift” to one entrant, as well!

Good luck!

UPDATE: The contest is now over. Congratulations to Simon for winning the Billy Joel DLC, and Evan for winning the 160 MSP code! Another DLC contest coming on Friday!

Late last year, Viacom announced that they were going to be selling off Harmonix due to Viacom’s ”lack of expertise in the console games business.” Not long after, and just prior to the sale of Harmonix being completed, the former shareholders of Harmonix filed a lawsuit against Viacom, alleging that they manipulated profits so they wouldn’t be on the hook for millions of dollars of performance-based bonuses. Viacom was quick to rebut the allegations, and in September of this year filed a counter-suit. Now, we find out that a jointly-appointed resolution accountant has found in favor of Harmonix on December 19th, and that Viacom actually owes them $383 million dollars in bonus that were unpaid.

Details of the resolution are not publicly available, but we have explained in previous posts (see links above) why Viacom probably wasn’t going to be successful. You’re not going to circumvent revenue-recognition rules for performance-based bonus and then successfully explain why that was legitimate.

However, Viacom didn’t take like the resolution of the accountant they jointly-appointed, so they quickly filed a suit in a Delaware court asking that the accounting firm to “consider arguments and evidence that were improperly excluded” from its report, saying that its figures resulted from “manifest error.”  Considering that arbitration with a “resolution accountant” has been going on for nearly a year at this point, Viacom’s counter-suit from September in retrospect now looks like things weren’t going their way for awhile.

[Gamasutra via Jeffrey]

What’s that, Viacom? Harmonix can’t hear you over all the money they’re making. 

Not even a year out from the sale of Harmonix from Viacom, things are looking quite a bit different than they this time last year. While many places around the blogosphere were posting (erroneous) news at the time that “Harmonix was sold for only $50,” it seems like Harmonix may be having the last laugh. With the advent of the Microsoft Kinect, Dance Central appears to be their new cash cow, with the first title selling over 2.5 million copies, and the sequel just recently released.

Business and financial news agency Bloomberg recently reported that according to Harmonix COO Florian Hunziker, ”2011 will be the most profitable year Harmonix has ever recorded,” and Hunziker expects over $100 million in net profit for the 200-employee company.  More amazing is that the $100 million number is profit, not revenue. (Accounting 101: Profit is the money you have after you pay all your expenses.)

[UPDATE: Damn. I had a feeling this was coming. Just touched base with @HMXHenry, and he let me know that the "$100 million" number quoted SHOULD be revenue, and not profit. I had a feeling that was too good to be true. $100 million in REVENUE makes much more sense, but is still a VERY impressive number.]

So what does this mean for Rock Band? Even if the DLC model wasn’t profitable (even though it is), Harmonix has stated several times that they are still committed to the Rock Band franchise, and having the ability to infuse capital from one franchise to the other is an excellent sign of things to come.

One other little nugget of information I found interesting in the Bloomberg article was around the future of music licensing costs:

Michael Pachter of Wedbush Morgan estimates that on average 20 percent of the wholesale price of a Rock Band game has historically gone to pay licensing fees. Now that Guitar Hero is no longer bidding for the same music as Rock Band, he expects those fees to come down. 

The article also mentioned that Harmonix is working on “multiple new music games that won’t resemble Rock Band or Dance Central.” Interesting…

[via Bloomberg]

Yesterday, the folks from Harmonix set up a livestream from the infamous “Star Chamber” to both play Halloween-themed Rock Band songs, as well as address a number of DLC requests random questions from fans via Twitter, the RockBand.com forums, and the live chat. While most of the answers given were either information we’ve already known, or confirmation of some commonly-held assumptions, there were a few interesting takeaways.

I think the biggest thing that had people talking after the fact was that the songs from the Country Track Pack 2 will be released “soon,” and will include Rock Band 3 features, unlike the exported version, which lacks the keys parts (where rarely applicable). The handful of Rock Band DLC completionists will find this frustrating, but to everyone else, this means they can finally get Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire.

Someone asked about why, unlike DLC for other games, Harmonix doesn’t include achievements with their DLC. John Drake commented that there is an odd achievement to price ratio that the consoles require, and that new DLC for Rock Band will not contain new achievements. Similarly, there are no plans to introduce new goals or challenges with new DLC for Rock Band 3.

With regards to Rock Band Pro, John mentioned that there are no plans for “lesson DLC,” nor are there plans to produce a Rock Band Pro guitar with a whammy bar.

If you’ve been a fan since the beginning, you may recall seeing a Rock Band demo video that featured Guns N Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle.” While John couldn’t give specifics (so read between the lines here, people), he mentioned that “certain members may have been exclusive to other games” at the time, and that when communication with the “band” opened up during negotiation around the Chinese Democracy track and later DLC, issues between the former band members prevent the older tracks from making it into the game.

And as for the “URL hacking” on RockBand.com that occasionally bears fruit, while John has mentioned on podcasts to “knock it off,” @HMXHenry commented that it is a “minor inconvenience.”

Finally, and I had to step away a few times during the livestream, I heard @HMXHenry say that there are NO band-specific titles currently planned, but I also thought I heard them say something else about what is coming our way. I thought I heard John say that there will be no “Rock Band 4 soon,” but there will be a Rock Band title in 2012. Can someone confirm that, or was I imagining that part?

Random technical difficulties and occasional audio lag issues aside, it was pretty entertaining, both from the value Harmonix provided, as well as with “the chuckleheads” in the live chat. Harmonix has mentioned that they will probably do more of these in the future, and it is interesting to see an interactive back-and-forth between the fans and the developers.

Oh, and also…

Alex Navarro and Alex Rigopulos – Image from @SaikoSakura

Harmonix alumnus and Whiskey Media movie/games junkie Alex Navarro recently returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts to sit down with the head honchos over at Harmonix to ruminate about the company, as well as our beloved Rock Band franchise. The first of a very thorough two part interview, Alex chats with CEO Alex Rigopulos, CTO Eran Egozy, and Senior VP of Product Development Greg LoPiccolo. I highly recommend you head on over to Giant Bomb to check out the entire piece, but I’ve taken the liberty of highlighting some of the more interesting responses below.

Viacom’s ownership of Harmonix was short-lived, and there may still be some bad blood between the two companies, but it wasn’t ALL bad under Viacom. We’ve heard before that The Beatles: Rock Band definitely wouldn’t have happened without the support of Viacom, but this also mentions that the entire franchise might not have been possible without Viacom’s help:

Greg LoPiccolo: “Rock Band wouldn’t have happened without their involvement. I’m glad it happened, because I think what we did was pretty cool. When you look back on it, it was pretty crazy. I remember people at the time saying it was crazy. ‘So, wait, what? There’s going to be a box, and it’s going to cost like $170, and retailers are going to actually stock this, and it’s all going to work, and people are going to set this up in their living rooms…” If you think about it, it’s sort of nutty. But they did help us. We had to figure out how to set things up in China, we had to send people to China, that was a whole drama unto itself.”

They also briefly touch on the “Cold War” with the Guitar Hero franchise, and that the oft-used “oversaturation” excuse blamed for the eventual downturn in the genre wasn’t entirely the case, and is actually much more complicated:

Alex Rigopulos: “The conventional explanation is that the category died because Activision oversaturated it with too many releases. I think that there is probably some truth to that, but I also think that people like very neat, tidy, causal explanations that are, in fact, generally much more complicated phenomena. I think there are many different contributing factors to the decline of the genre. One of is that one, the conventional explanation, the other is that I think that there actually is some fad element to it, that regardless of how many titles Activision released, it was going to decline in popularity. I also think there’s some macro-economic variables. These were the most expensive games in the industry during a historic recession. It wasn’t easy to be selling a $200 game when people were losing jobs and had declining incomes. I guess my point is that it’s complicated, as these things tend to be.”

Alex has even touched base with Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, and even went so far as to say:

“I don’t consider the fact that we were intense competitors in the past to necessarily preclude the idea that we could work together on the right thing in the future.”

And what about the future of Rock Band? That was talked about quite a bit…

Alex Rigopulos: ”I’d love to talk at great length about that, of course. I’m reluctant to say too much about where we’re headed with it right now, except to reiterate that it’s a pretty radical departure.”

Eran Egozy: “It’s interesting. We do have plans on where we’re going to go with Rock Band and how we plan to expand it. All I’ll say for now is that it isn’t what you think. You might assume we’re going to add saxophone or something along those lines, but no, the kind of direction we’re planning on taking Rock Band, the kind of innovation we have in mind, is taking it in a different direction, one that’s more suitable to the kind of environment we’re in, what people are doing now, what they’re interested in playing now, versus, say, 2007. It’s more than ideas. We are working on it, and we have forward progress. It’s an exciting, fresh take on it. I’ll leave it at that.

Finally, the Rock Band Network was briefly mentioned as well, and ideas are being explored for the future, although no details were made at this time.

So… Radical departure, huh? Let us know in the comments where you think they’re taking Rock Band!

[via Giant Bomb]

Yeah. This is what I want from Harmonix.

OK, while I’m a self-admitted Harmonix fanboy, I usually try to keep only news related to Rock Band here on this site. But sometimes I see things that may be fringe-related, and they have to end up on the site, like this little “recommendation.”

In the November 2011 issue of Fast Company, a business publication that I actually enjoy based on my real life livelihood in finance, a piece is included that is titled “Six Companies That Should Take The Plunge In 2012,” and includes companies that should take some big risks to reclaim the glory they once previously held. This list includes Barnes & Nobles, Honda, Burger King, the NBA, Quiznos, and… Harmonix Music Systems.

The piece mentions that the problem with Harmonix is that the company behind Guitar Hero “hasn’t done much since, and consumers are losing interest in disc-based video games.” OK.. let that sink in for a little bit, because it’s gonna get worse before it gets better. Nevermind the success of the Rock Band and Dance Central franchises, because apparently it has been all downhill since Guitar Hero: Rocks the 80s. And if it’s one thing that we all know, it’s that no one is buying disc-based video games anymore. This sounds like bad news for games like Batman: Arkham City, Skyrim, and Battlefield 3. Too bad no one will be purchasing those…

OK, let’s continue with what the strategy guru at Fast Company recommends Harmonix Music Systems should do to pull out of its tailspin.

“Spend whatever it takes to create the world’s first immersive shoot-’em-up, where gamers move their bodies to take cover. “It’s bound to happen,” says Marc Nesbitt, a former video-game producer, “and Harmonix has a head start with Kinect technology.“

Um… What? Fast Company made the effort to print out the full name of the company, Harmonix Music Systems, and then goes on to talk about how they should leave their core competency to make another first person shooter clone? What would such a game even be called? And if this was a two years ago, he would have wanted Harmonix to make a MMORPG using the WiiFit. It might not entirely be the author’s fault for this “plunge,” as the “former video-game producer” referenced is currently listed as a Senior Producer at MTV Games, so read into that for what it’s worth.

Oh, and in case anyone is wondering, he also recommends that the NBA should play FEWER games, Honda should make a “space wagon,” and Quizno’s should go food-truck only.

[via Fast Company]