What if EA had an internal start up? The BAFTA-winning Boom Blox team is an agile, closely-knit group which answers questions by prototyping before building design documents. Our small team takes on big challenges, and believes strongly in building a team culture where the whole is far greater than its parts – each member makes a very real contribution to the game, and awesome ideas can come from anyone. However, as part of the EA organization, we have enormous resources and talent at our disposal. In many important aspects, our team has the best of both worlds. Our last two titles were Wii-based, but our next titles will be for the next generation. – EA job listing on Gamasutra
I’d actually be surprised if we didn’t see Boom Blox come to the PS3 and/or Xbox 360 once their motion controllers come out. Still, I keep this marked as a rumor until we get something a little more official.
Link
-Justin
I’m not all that surprised that Rock Band has been unprofitable for Viacom. The costs associated for buying Harmonix, development of the game, the manufacture of the instruments are huge. I’m sure Viacom was counting on Guitar Hero 3 like sales to make their investment back, which hasn’t happened so far. Add to that the fact that sales have been slowing for the music genre and things don’t look so good for the franchise.
Read the full report here.
-Justin
“We’re not expecting a typical videogame curve where you sell the majority of the units in the first month and then it decays quickly. We’re expecting this to be the type of game that may come out of the gate a little bit slower, but continue to grow over time. We’ve got a bit of a head start, people have an understanding what music games are, it has the ‘Hero’ brand on it. But at the same time, people don’t know what a DJ game is. They don’t know what you’re supposed to do. Our strategy again is to focus on in-store demos. If you look at Guitar Hero 3, which to date has been the most successful Guitar Hero game selling 12 million units, it did take three iterations to get the game out there and for people to know how it works.” – Red Octane co-founder Kai Huang
My gut feeling is that not only will DJ Hero sales start slow but that they will always be slow.
Turntables just don’t have the same kind of mass appeal as Guitars and the market is completely saturated with music based games at this point. Additionally, this is the launch of a new product that carries a large price tag in the middle of a recession. Not a good combination of factors.
Link
-Justin
