http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1227617

The game apparently pushed publisher Mad Catz from a profit into a $11 million dollar loss single handedly. They are now stuck with $8+ million of unsold inventory that they have to get rid of before September. Ouch.

People are not interested in revisting the fads of 8-10 years ago, new Brain Training, new Wii Fit, new Rock Band, new Kinect Sports, new Wii Sports (Club), all basically flopped while Nintendogs + cats at launch did zilch for the 3DS other than lead it to Nintendo having to take their first loss ever.

These games aren't even able to put up even decent numbers, they are mostly just full on bombs and it's not a quality issue as they are equal/better in quality to previous installments in most cases.

I gave my Rock Band 2&3 + instrument set away couple years back to my nephew as they just collected dust. They got a year of fun out of it before collecting dust there.

It was a fun fad, but too much too quick, and dried up and I don't see it coming back.

Honestly, I was shocked when the game was announced. I figured the market for these rhythm games evaporated a while ago.

That fact, combined with the report that Harmonix employees planted anonymous positive reviews online makes it hard for me to show much sympathy.

I was interested, until I saw that the price almost doubled here in Canada. Forget paying close to $300 for Rock Band.

How come it flopped?, the install base was more than suitable for them to make the money back.

Personally I think what's happened is tablets/phones are too good at pleasing the itch for casual gaming today and they do so for free with monstrous variety so casuals never get tired of playing because there's always new games to be had.

Even the people who said "b .. bu ... but Wii/Rock Band/social gaming was always about getting up off your feet and playing with others! Smartphones don't replace that!" ... they basically do in the sense that tablet games for example are easy enough for a parent to play with their child and bond with together. I see parents playing with their kids or 2-3 kids gathered around one iPad all the time.

Just like the arcade is still to this day a unique experience that a home console can never 100% replicate ... but from the Dreamcast era onwards home consoles could do a good enough job of approximating the arcade experience that at least in the West the arcade went extinct basically.

You can feel sympathy for the publisher that had nothing to do with the actions of Harmonix. The publisher had to lay off like 80 people and the CEO and board and all resigned.

I remember mad catz sold me a price headset back in 2008. Well like 60$ which was pricey to me then. It was the biggest piece of shit waste of money ever.

Don't feel sympathy for them!!

Yeah, fringe gaming and casual entertainment has become completely enveloped by the smartphone/tablet craze. This is really not surprising.

It flopped because this is the first Rock Band where Harmonix was funding their own development - after their split with EA, HMX basically went Indie and on Rock Band 4, they couldn't afford good advertising. The set list is all filler songs that couldn't have cost them that much to license. There's no online play for the game yet either which is huge, only leaderboards. Rock Band Network isn't compatible yet either.

And finally, the instruments this time around launched with game breaking bugs on the hardware and software side. This is why harmonix is about to release updated hardware from a new vendor company for the game - madcatz instruments are just bad and have severe latency issues. My drum set broke probably my 10th time using them. That's never happened in the passed.

With Rock Band 4, the game is set to serve as a 'platform' that's not meant to have a sequel this generation. Harmonix has, true to their word been updating the game over time and we are slowly seeing the return of features, so I'm suspecting this game will have legs.

I also forgot to mention that there's no practice mode yet, a big deal imo

All in all, they just didn't have the proper resources to make a complete game out of the box. Everything went bad with them while under EA, and they probably just didn't want to deal with big publishers like that anymore. Harmonix is actually a really good company and they are very in touch with their base. We've had talks with them on the forums over at Scorehero years ago and they had official status titles. It sucks this is happening, but it is what it is