Yeah Activision kinda oversaturated the market just a teeny bit

Proper (negative) blame:

Activision:

• Saturated the Market with discs, which, although pricey and expensive, would go down with time (I got GH:SH for $8 $2 Shipping)
• Copied features from Harmonix
• Made an admittedly mediocre outdated Van Halen game
• Made Band Hero featuring Taylor Swift, Taylor Swift, and more Taylor Swift!
• Didn't import many songs off of discs that should have been imported
• Took out celebrities because of controversies with Kurt Cobain and No Doubt
• Kinda Crappy DLC
• Has some similar DLC songs as RB

Rock Band:

• Focused on much more expensive DLC that sells well, but hardly ever gets a discount
• Copied features from Activision
• Made a Green Day game
• Made a Lego Rock Band Game
• Added too much stuff: no-one wants to sing harmonies 99% of the time, and keyboard? Really? Lowest guy on the totem pole in a Rock Band
• Tried to make it too real: I am learning real guitar and combining the two like that is a dumb idea, sorry. And RB and Power Gig are picking fights with each other. The commercials sometimes literally come right after another.
• Made cheaply-built, expensive-to-buy default instruments that broke very easily.
• Screwed over Australians
• Screwed over Wii owners
• Has some similar DLC songs as GH

Disagree. The basic issue is that 'casual' gamers are not idiots that buy the same game every few months unlike 'core' gamers that buy the same Call of Duty game every year. Those terms are both silly because 'core' means young, gormless males.

I blame the Green Day: Rock Band game. What a crappy band to continue the series coming off of the The Beatles: Rock Band, which was a good seller.

Seriously, there should have been a Jimi Hendrix: Rock Band or Nirvana: Rock Band. They would have sold four times the number than that pop punk Green Day craptastic game.

Furthermore, the death nail I believe is Power Gig: Rise of the Six-String, which is the culmination of many in the music industry's beef with games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, particularly that a-hole Lars Ulrich from Metallica. It is a game and they feel as if their music is being cheapened so they have to get all arrogant and fund a game that is not even a real simulation of playing the guitar in Power Gig?

Freaking ridiculous, yet I could be wrong.

Not suprised at all.

One of my friends used to be a Guitar Hero addict 3 years ago but now doesn't even touch any music game and goes for Halo.

Even at the height of the genre, I could see this coming (before it, really, thanks to the Japanese market and its response to Guitar Freaks and Drum Mania).  When sales were good, there were just too many games coming out from the same two comapnies to warrent continued purchases.  There was an obvious saturation point, and the publishers blatantly ignored it.  Considering the fact that gamers tend to go from one interest to another, it was easy to see that people who liked the genre at one point would give up on it even if they don't dislike it now.  They just want to play something different.

At this point, people who still want to get in can buy earlier games very cheaply.  They can even get the instruments for very little (used) because so many of them exist.  And at the same time the newer games have been so heavily transformed to accomodate the experienced players that have moved back to other genres they like that new players would actually prefer to track down the older games for a more reasonable experience.

This doesn't mean the genre is dead, though.  The opposite, in fact.  What the genre needs is a scaling back so that there is an incentive to buy a new game for the new player (who doesn't want things too complex) as well as the seasoned player (who has other interests).  The number of games published by Activision and EA could have been spread out over more years and could have gotten more sales, and eventually someone will come along and reinvigorate the genre at some point when it is under represented.

This wouldn't be new in gaming at all.  It wouldn't even be new in the music genre, either.  GH wasn't a new concept to anyone that played Guitar Freaks.  DDR wasn't a new concept to anyone that bought power pad based games.  There are definite technological and regional concerns that factor in, but music/rhythm gaming has shown that as a whole it will not die.  It thrives off of innovation and proper targeting, and it fails when those factors do.  Right now, in the West, there is a distinct oversaturation of instrument-based based games fueled by the publishers, and when that ends someone else will find some way to fill the void even if it takes many years.

It was inevitable and a part of me believes the publishers knew this (hence the attempt to get as many SKUs out as possible before the milk went dry), even if the developers, many of whom are musicians themselves, did not.

It's not that the games continually dropped in quality; if anything RB3 offers the most "realistic" simulated experience in a music game, but that may actually be part of the problem. The genre has simply evolved about as far as it can without turning into full blown "learn how to play covers of your favorite rock and pop songs with real but really inexpensive instruments" video game tutors.

As the games get more technical and specialized (catering to would be musicians), the niche shrinks considerably.

And while it's easy to blame oversaturation for the shrinking commercial viability for the genre, it may well be that the general public has simply lost interest, much like dance pad games and kareoke games.

In a way, as a part of the would be musician niche, music rhythm games eventually made me come to the conclusion that hours spent playing Rock Band would be better spent learning riffs, chords, scales and bass grooves, even if it takes longer to learn. But at least music games are still fun at parties because you don't have to be a musician to play.

Why "blame" Activision. It's a business model.
Get all the money you can while people are interested in your product: so it's a good move by them.
Who can assure me that if they hadn't released those many games people would have been far more interested today in buying a music game than what they are now? After all they generated a lot of revenue for the industry, where not only they were benefitted, but retailers and HW manufacturers too.

Putting to many out in the same year is not good buisness. Any franchise would be doomed if they did this. I would even say Mario would be doomed if they put out that many platformer Marios in the same year

no its?

its alot worse then that! hells been burnning it for wks now. hell has come for the music genre (excluding beaterator cause that music genius)