Sunday, March 17, 2013

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:

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.

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.

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.



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?
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?"
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)