KickStart Rock Band 3.5, Part 2

In my last post, I essentially begged Harmonix to allow a 3rd party to come in to make a Rock Band 3.5.  The backlog I suggested for that project was fairly lengthy.  I sent a Tweet to @HMXHenry, which is the twitter account for Aaron Trites, Harmonix's community manager.  Amazingly, he got back to me on the same day with the following tweets. If you agreed with me and wanted to see Rock Band 3.5, this will be a little -ahem- disheartening, despite his efforts to soften the blow. I'm including my responses inline:

@burlyearly It's certainly a laudable goal and your devotion is appreciated. But from a technical, legal, & financial perspective unlikely.
— Aaron Trites (@HMXhenry) March 16, 2013

Well, yeah, it's unlikely, from all of those perspectives.  Hence the approach of using a KickStarter. If there's interest, great, it happens.  If not, the project dies on the vine, I cry a little inside, and switch over to using and fixing up Performous, which at the moment sucks, and will in all likelihood never have as good a selection of music (due to licensing) as RockBand.

@burlyearly For RBN on PS3, since that was what kicked your post off, if it was as simple as a patch we'd have done it years ago.
— Aaron Trites (@HMXhenry) March 16, 2013

I have no illusions that it would be as simple as a patch. I chose my terminology poorly in my original post - I should have said update, upgrade, new version, or whatever - yes, this thing is a pretty big overhaul. From a technical perspective, I believe there is plenty of evidence that the PS3 is plenty capable of allowing games/apps to hit the web directly: NetFlix and YouTube, for example, clearly download their data, not through the Sony store, but from web servers sitting outside of Sony's sandbox, i.e., directly from the Internet. The PS3's web browser obviously does it. I see no technical reason that RB3.5 couldn't use something like libcurl to go out and download song data via HTTPS rather than using Sony's game store APIs to download stuff. So I'm sure if there really is anything complicated about this, it's purely a legal/licensing thing. I've heard rumors that Microsoft has some sort of licensing deal with Harmonix that essentially forbids them from doing what I'm proposing, and HMXHenry has in the past told me enough about how restrictive the record labels are that I have every reason to believe there would be issues there, as well. Worse yet, HMXHenry is probably under NDA and can't reveal all of the hamstrings that would have to be dealt with to make this one happen.

@burlyearly MS has a ton of UGC tools in place that the PS3 and Wii don't and those are essential to RBN. That 1st party support is crucial.
— Aaron Trites (@HMXhenry) March 16, 2013

So yeah, this hints at the rumors I've heard about Microsoft's fingers (and their grubby lawyers' fingers) being embedded in the deal. Microsoft provides some user-generated content tools to make it easier to build content to upload so that XBox players can share with each other. I'm not sure why (other than legal grounds) this would preclude that content also or later being made available by a web service that RB3.5 on PS3 and WII could go download from. Guess it's lawyers again.

@burlyearly So even if a patch somehow were an audience, Sony would have to alter the structure of their outgoing console, and there...
— Aaron Trites (@HMXhenry) March 16, 2013

@burlyearly ...would have to be an audience large enough to support it. Unfortunately neither of those seems likely at this point.
— Aaron Trites (@HMXhenry) March 16, 2013

This is the first I've heard of any limitations on the PS3 being an issue. As I mentioned, the Netflix and YouTube PS3 apps do precisely what I'm proposing (download content from a source other than the PSN), so I don't really see where there would have to be any structural change. I'm thinking the real problem here is that the PSN is probably deeply intertwined with RB3 on PS3, and putting in an alternative store is a large undertaking and not something Harmonix is willing to risk, given that the game is, what, 3 years old, sales are probably next to nil, and the DLC store probably isn't making much money (if it was making major bank, I'm guessing Harmonix would be having trouble keeping up with it, rather than shutting it down). I totally understand Harmonix not wanting to risk it. That's the beauty of KickStarter. You dangle a carrot in front of the audience. "Hey, we're willing to put this release together, for the community, but we just don't have the resources to do it if nobody will care. If we can essentially get a bunch of pre-orders, we'll do it. Are you in?" Some movie studios are doing this (I believe even big ones, like Warner Brothers!!) for more artsy projects, and tons of Indy game writers are doing this as well. Why not an established game developer with a strong brand, like Harmonix?

@burlyearly Hopefully that provides some additional context. Really appreciate the dedication though, honestly.
— Aaron Trites (@HMXhenry) March 16, 2013

It does provide some additional context, and I really appreciate the actual response from an honest-to-goodness thinking human being. It's not exactly uncommon for companies to provide canned, retarded responses when an excited fan offers help, and your response is exceptional, even if it's not the one I want. I realize that you're trying to break bad news in a friendly way, and that I probably am just dreaming. Of course, I'd be willing to bet if you walk down the hallway and talk to the founders, they would tell you it seemed a bit unrealistic to think that a game like RB3 could exist when they first started thinking about making music performance games.

I'm completely willing to donate the time and effort to build a team to manage the KickStarter campaign, and to do whatever I can to limit Harmonix's risk. My biggest goal here is for Rock Band to stick around pretty much indefinitely, even if it's just a small cottage industry. The question isn't, "hey is this possible?" Of course it's possible. The question isn't "how likely is it?" We know it's unlikely (right now). The question is: "what can we do to change it from being unlikely, to likely?"

KickStart Rock Band 3.5

So anybody who knows me knows that I'm one of those people who still plays Rock Band.  Incessantly. I play it for several reasons:

• My wife loves to sing, and I love to hear her sing.
• I love to play drums, but cannot remember any particular beats, so sight-reading the drum lane is very fun for me.
• Drumming gives me some good exercise.  Especially RUSH, even though they're always really humbling to play.
• It's just damned fun.

Anyway, for those who don't know, Harmonix has decided to stop producing DLC for RockBand.  That's understandable.  They set up Rock Band Network (RBN) to be a marketplace where 3rd parties could provide DLC, rather than Harmonix doing it, and are now off doing other stuff.

But there are is a big problem with this, for PlayStation 3 players, like myself: the amount of stuff that migrates from XBox RBN to PlayStation 3 RBN is incredibly limited.  So PS3 gamers feel a bit "out in the cold."

Earlier today, I proposed putting together a KickStarter to start a non-profit company to basically partner with Harmonix to take over game patches and continue the DLC. Chad Flake pointed out that RBN is intended to continue the DLC, and patches are expensive due to Microsoft charging $40k per patch released to XBox:

• https://www.facebook.com/RockBand/posts/10151625362105209?comment_id=225429244&notif_t=feed_comment

So in my mind, XBox patch pricing, while outrageous, falls exactly in the cost structure for a KickStarter.  Let's do a little bit of math:

• Microsoft Patch Tax: $40,000
• Programmer: $60,000
• QA Engineer: $60,000

That looks to me like a roughly $160,000 budget. Probably on the high end for a KickStarter, but I think enough value could be put into a RockBand 3 patch to make it something that folks would support.  Would it be $160,000 worth of support?  Who knows?!  I could probably take vacation and donate my time, which would mean the programmer position would be removed, cutting the budget to $100k, but I would need to fly to Boston and work at Harmonix so I could pick the brains of the experts, again, if they'd be willing to let me :-)  That'd probably add a few thousand back in, but I could probably find a QA person (I bet my wife would volunteer) and the QA costs would disappear.

Here's the backlog I would like to see:

• Update PS3, XBox, and WII to utilize a single web service outside the confines of any platform's game store for purchasing RBN DLC (possibly in addition to the platform's game store)
• Update RB3 so that song metadata is indexed.  Currently the game takes what feels like an eternity to start if you have a substantial DLC library - it looks from playing it like the game is reading individual song files on every launch rather than a small sqlite-ish index.
• Update RB3 to remember microphone settings
• Update RB3 so that big rock endings do not require both microphones if you're singing solo but the song supports harmonies.
• Update RB3 to remove the 3,000 song limit.  I am currently very picky about what songs I will purchase because it has been publicized that RB3 will allow you to have, at most, 3,000 songs.  That and the ridiculous startup time.
• Update RB3 to allow downloading DLC from an authoring PC, even on PS3, or for a PC to push those songs to it while it's running.
• Update RB3 so game avatars can be more "set in stone."  Currently the game will occasionally forget which avatars you like to have playing.
• Update RB3 to remember little things like "I play Expert Drums in Pro Mode" Why do I need to choose that every time I start browsing songs?  Or "I sing in Solo Expert Mode"
• Update RB3 to optionally not show the cut scene before and after songs.  When I want to rock, I want to ROCK.  RIGHT NOW.
• Update RB3 to optionally not show the avatars playing at all - just a blank background or some visualization, or whatever.
• Update RB3 to allow 3rd parties to provide new avatars and animations, available from the web service that would provide the RBN DLC.  Maybe somebody wants to pretend they're aliens playing music, or fish, or whatever.
• Add a web server to RB3 so that people using cell phones, tablets, or whatever, logged into the same network as the game, could browse the song list and queue up songs they'd like to hear or perform.  This would be an excellent addition for Rock Band parties, and open the door to using RB3 as the "new karaoke."
• On the same lines, add better song library navigation.  Search would be a great option to have.  Especially if I could search for lyrics - I don't always know the song's name, for example.
• Whatever others would like to have.

I guess the point is that there's a lot that could be added to the game if Harmonix will let somebody come in and do it, and I think/hope the community would be willing to step up and fund it.  It would basically be a Rock Band 3.5 release.