When Viacom announced its decision to sell Rock Band and Guitar Hero creator Harmonix last week, it seemed like a precursor to bad news. That bad news has manifested itself in the form of plunging sales results, and it seems that the days of rhythm games with pricey plastic peripherals may very well be over.
Gamasutra analyst Matt Matthews took a look at the decline of the genre and came up with some startling results. Based on the figures shown below, the music genre has plummeted fivefold from January – October 2008 to the same time period in 2010.
"The total haul for music games in 2008 was over $1.6 billion. That dropped to over $870 million in 2009. Short of a Christmas miracle, music games won’t break $400 million for all of 2010," wrote Matthews.
These results have all but proven that the critically successful and innovative Rock Band 3 has failed to turn things around for what now appears to be a doomed gaming genre.
