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By Edge

In Europe, Rock Band is twice the price of the American version – what happened?

The price is worked out in collaboration between us, distributors and retailers. I’m from the UK, I understand the whole ‘Why is it that all consumer electronics I buy have the same number, but with the dollar sign replaced with a pound sign?’ thing. I feel the pain: the price is kind of frightening. I don’t mean to make excuses, but there’s VAT, prices in the US don’t include tax, and things like that. We wanted to give people a choice, though: splash £50 on the game and use any USB microphone to sing. Or you could get drums or guitar.

What’s delayed the European launch?

We wanted to get it right. We wanted to make sure there were enough UK tracks in the game, so we’ve added Oasis, Blur and Muse. The other thing we wanted to make sure was that we had all the hardware completely worked out. There were troubles with the reliability of the early guitars, which are now ironed out. Two years ago, we were just a software company. Now we’ve got this hardware arm: factories in China, learning how to ship around the world, a whole logistical challenge that we did a pretty awesome job of, considering it was the first time.

Are you any closer to reaching an agreement with Activision allowing PS3 Guitar Hero guitars to work on Rock Band?

Our approach is that music games shouldn’t be competing with each other. It should all be compatible, because people have already gone out and bought stuff. So if people want to make their stuff compatible with Rock Band, please let us know.

In cases where companies, for whatever reason, decide that their hardware shouldn’t be compatible, we direct people to go talk to those companies.

Is the success of a product like Rock Band changing Harmonix very much?

It’s awesome because people want to give you money. There’s no way we could have made a game like Rock Band unless we had success. Now we want to put ourselves in a position where we work on innovative stuff, and also capitalize on the stuff that we’ve made. We want our cake and want to eat it as well: we don’t want to be in a position where we haven’t got the cycles to expend on blue-sky stuff. There’s a lot of internal work to settle the structures to make that happen. For example, having people devoted to research is a basic component of that.

What’s it like competing against Guitar Hero, a series you initially developed?

I don’t try to think about competing with other music games, because you just end up looking at what they’re doing. We want to keep looking forward: how to make creating music as accessible as possible. Really, if we’re going to compete with anything, it’s other forms of entertainment, not other music games.

So is your real competitor iTunes rather than Activision?

I can certainly see people making those comparisons down the line. We see Rock Band as a music platform. We want to make that platform a reality, so when people are just listening to music, they’re not experiencing everything in it any more. We want people to get inside music on a different level.

Does Rock Band’s DLC make it harder to justify new retail versions and expansion packs?

These are questions we’ve been dealing with internally. We think the music platform is everything, and that’s where we can iterate on it. The games that we do in the future can’t break the platform, they have to be complementary. We’re working on a bunch of cool ways to take music games into the future; some of them might end up in future games branded Rock Band, some of them might end up in other stuff. We’re most concerned with the continuity of the music. We don’t want you to buy a piece of music in Rock Band and then find a year down the line it doesn’t work any more because people have moved on to something else.

Is DLC changing the way you make games?

The sales figures are really interesting, but I think we’re going to be quite guarded about how we let that affect our choices of songs. We don’t want the tastes of a few people to dictate how this works. The Portal song is niche, but people go crazy for it. That’s the thing about digital distribution – it lowers the costs of trying something.

Are there plans for user-generated content in Rock Band’s future?

It’s definitely part of Harmonix’s future. One day, all the bands in the world will be able to get their music into a game without us having to be a bottleneck. That’s a long-term goal, but we are devoting time to figuring