Long before Guitar Hero, Harmonix founder and lead developer Alex Rigopulos had a vision — to bring the joy of music making to the masses. In the late 1990s, he and co-founder Eran Egozy were studying music education at the MIT Media Lab, when they discovered something that would eventually lead to one of the [...]
Posts Tagged ‘guitar hero’
Complexity Will Not Save the Music Genre
Posted in Industry News, Innovation, music, video game marketing, video games, tagged guitar hero, guitarfreaks, harmonix, powergig, rock band on September 8, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Message to MTV Games: Don’t Blame The Economy
Posted in Marketing, music, video game marketing, video games, tagged guitar hero, harmonix, mtv, rock band on June 18, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Gamasutra’s Kris Graft recently reported that Despite all of the hype and the high-profile licensing agreement surrounding the Fab Four’s video game appearance in Harmonix’s The Beatles: Rock Band, MTV Games has conceded that the title didn’t meet commercial expectations. This should come as no surprise. Last summer, as I was preparing to submit the [...]
Complexity: The Classic Performance Trap
Posted in video game marketing, video games, tagged guitar hero, miracle piano, rhythm games, rock band on February 25, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Back in October, I wrote about the decline of music simulation games in a post titled, Too Much of a Good Thing: Explaining the decline of Guitar Hero and Rock Band. That article generated significant discussion on Wired.com and numerous other websites. One article by Joe Rybicki of Plastic Axe focused on this observation from [...]
Explaining the 2009 Decline in Video Game Revenue
Posted in Industry News, playstation, sony, video games, tagged guitar hero, project natal, ps2, rock band, wii on January 19, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Recently, Gamasutra posted revenue figures for the three major console makers, showing across the board declines. Especially hard hit in 2009 was Sony Corp. with a $1.3 billion drop. Source: Gamasutra The analysis rightly points to the decline of the PS2 as one of the reasons behind Sony’s apparent misfortune, a trend we recognized in [...]
Too Much of a Good Thing: Explaining the decline of Guitar Hero and Rock Band
Posted in Innovation, Marketing, tagged activision, guitar hero, harmonix, mtv, redoctane, rock band, rock revolution, viacom on October 28, 2009 | 22 Comments »
In 2006, after its acquisition by Activision, RedOctane dismissed Harmonix Music Systems as lead developer for the Guitar Hero brand of music games. Harmonix was then acquired by Viacom, which resulted in a bifurcation in instrument-based rhythm games. Since then, Guitar Hero (RedOctane) and Rock Band (Harmonix) have been in a neck and neck battle [...]
Sales of The Beatles: Rock Band Exceed Expectations
Posted in Industry News, tagged activision, beatles, casual games, guitar hero, rock band, viacom, video games on September 29, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
According to Viacom CEO Phillipe Dauman, The Beatles: Rock Band has exceeded sales projections and some editions could sell out by November. That is good news for the ailing videogame industry. The Beatles: Rock Band is one of several games featured in a chapter focused on the music genre. In it, we point out a [...]
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About the Authors
David Wesley is research manager at Northeastern University's College of Business Administration and a founding member of the Institute for Global Innovation Management. 
Prof. Gloria Barczak is recognized as one of the world's leading innovation management scholars. She is also a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Product Innovation Management, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, and Creativity and Innovation Management.Readers’ Corner
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