Like many times before, Rock Band and Guitar Hero will be competing with each other as Guitar Hero Live and Rock Band 4 are released this month. Alex Rigopulos the creative director at Harmonix recently spoke about the competition between the two games.
Interestingly Rigopulos stated that he doesn’t believe that Rock Band 4 will outsell Guitar Hero Live, but he also explained why he thinks that’s okay, “There’s no ambition or expectation that we will outsell Guitar Hero, that we’re going up against Activision,” Rigopulos said, “But we don’t need to. We can actually have a very healthy business serving a much more modest core, a small fraction of the people who played the game previously, and I think we’re perfectly content to do that.”
One big advantage that Rock Band 4 has is that fact players can use many of the guitars from previous games with the new game. Rigopulos said this is advantageous because it “frees us from the need to manufacture seven million units of peripherals.”
Harmonix has been working with Mad Catz for new instruments for Rock Band 4. When Guitar Hero Live launches on October 20th, it will not support instruments from previous games.
Rock Band 4 dropped on October 6th, and is available on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.