SteveStreeting.com

I could hug Harmonix. They have lived up to their original promise to providing a large, ever-expanding and varied collection of tracks on Rock Band with the kind of fervour that I think even fans have been surprised by. Apart from a couple of odd cases (Lego Rock Band and Beatles: Rock Band – the former puzzling, the latter due to brand management insistence that The Beatles should be revered as gods and can’t be seen mixing with peasants) Harmonix have avoided fragmenting the content available as much as possible and the result is a lot of people who have no reason to buy another music game; in fact there’s a positive incentive not to. It makes games that don’t try to integrate their content look a bit backward – it’s like being forced to use a portable CD player when you’ve been used to having everything immediately available on your iPod – inconvenient and horribly outdated.

So with the release of the Queen Pack today we passed the 300 track mark on Rock Band (307 in fact), which is both awesome and a little scary. That’s not even a third of the current content available, and it’s likely to go up once the Rock Band Network comes online. Will we ever stop? Well, we never stop stuffing new tracks in our iPods, so I don’t see why we would stop buying Rock Band tracks for the forseeable future either.

In related news, corporalgregg, the best source for full-band HD previews of tracks got his account suspended again (he thinks by Activision because he posted a GH video with Kurt Cobain in it) so has opened another one. Still the best place to go to review new RB tracks you’re thinking of buying IMO, but it’s a shame all that history has been lost. Thanks, big corporate bully.

RockBandContent.com is being shut down because the maintainer hasn’t got time to do it anymore, which is a shame because it’s a really nice site for browsing the increasingly crushing number of Rock Band tracks available and finding videos of people playing the charts before you buy.

However, I found over time that the best videos came from corporalgregg2, who always posts full-band videos which saves a lot of time over the individual instrument videos, as well as being very good so you can actually hear the song with everyone playing on Expert So I’m just subscribed to him from now on for reviewing the new songs as they come out. This week is really good again – you can’t complain when you get Blur, Kaiser Chiefs and Foo Fighters in one week.

One thing that’s always irked me about Rock Band 2 is that despite the song database being really good, with album groupings, filtering by artist / genre etc, album art, individual instrument difficulties and all that, it’s missing one vital feature: a ‘Recently Added’ playlist, or at least a sort by release date. When you get quite a big song list, and your friends ask ‘So what’s new recently?’, you’re forced to either remember (never a sound strategy for me), or page through all the songs looking for things that are new. It’s such an obvious feature that I wonder whether they just don’t have access to that information on the DLC files which is why it’s not there – I can’t imagine no-one’s asked for it; our list is ‘only’ 270-odd songs deep and it’s an issue, I can’t imagine what it’s like if you own all 800+ songs.

However, I found a website which helps with that in the comments of the RockBandContent.com shutdown post – MyRockBandSongs.com. It lets you add all the songs you’ve purchased and then sort them by date added. And when you add in bulk, that still sub-sorts by release date, which is perfect. At least I can whip out my mobile and look it up when someone asks, or link friends to it! Here’s my personal hastily constructed page – it may not be 100% complete, I added things in a rush.

So, following my 360’s demise I was looking up the practicalities of using an alternate borrowed machine temporarily until the repair is turned around. I’ve bought a lot of DLC (mostly Rock Band, but also quite a few XBLA games, Gears maps etc), and I know the license for them is associated with the machine, so I looked up the license transfer tool. All seemed pretty sensible and reasonable – I’d have to download everything again, but that’s no big deal.

Until I read the FAQ and realised that you can only transfer your licenses via this mechanism once every 12 months. WTF?

As I understand it, when a console is repaired, the license transfer is done automatically and doesn’t require you to use this tool (and also doesn’t count against your ‘once per 12 months’ limit). However, what I want to do is to use a borrowed machine until the repair comes back, and really I want to take all my DLC with me in both cases. I’m really not sure if trying to do this will cause the automatic transfer on repair not to work, and leave my DLC stranded on the ‘intermediate’ machine – I’m seeing a few  scare stories of people being told ‘tough’ by XBox support on this when they’ve tried to juggle 360s (usually because of a failure). Therefore, I may not transfer the DLC to the intermediate machine, which is a PITA because it basically rules out Rock Band, Peggle etc for the intervening period. Gah.

I have to be honest here, I have no idea what the hell Microsoft are thinking on this issue, if they’re truly thinking at all. What difference does it make if a customer wants to transfer their DLC to a new machine more than once in 12 months? Maybe they’re afraid that people will use it to ’swap’ DLC, but come on – it’s an all-or-nothing process so not really very useful for that in practice. This just seems to be a completely non-customer friendly, administrative nonsense, which given the failure rates on 360 and the fact that other people are going to want to do exactly what I want to do, just seems nonsensical. Way to encourage DLC purchases, guys – it’s exactly this kind of bullshit that makes people afraid of buying it compared to boxed product.

I was feeling pretty good about the data portability on 360 compared to what I considered was a dumb decision on PS3 not to allow swapping of hard drives, but it seems 360 has its share of dumb decisions on storage too. It appears that neither manufacturer has really got their head around giving the customer the freedom to control their own data, which in this case they have paid for and should be able to take it with them. For Christ sakes, Steam is miles better than this (locking content only to a Steam account, not a physical machine), and even so look how much bitching that originally provoked. Were the people making this DLC transfer policy asleep during that whole debate? It certainly seems so. Limiting the transfer of the customer’s own property would be a bad decision at the best of times, but in the light of the 360 failure rates it’s plain ridiculous.

Cool, another relatively unknown (in the US anyway) British band is getting their start in Rock Band next week; Glasvegas with their track Geraldine. It’s a really good song, so great that it’s in there.

Should I be ashamed that I’m glad Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin” is in there too? Probably.

And… Spongebob. Yeah, that Spongebob, it’s not some quirky ironic punk band or something. Bizarre – one for the kids though I guess

This week’s Rock Band DLC has gone a little bit country, which induces me to grimace at horrible, horrible memories of when Shania Twain and Billy Ray Cyrus were on the radio every other day – thank goodness that particular fad has passed before I was forced to go all Van Gogh on myself. But still, music is personal after all, and if you want to listen to hokey tunes with madatory banjo solos, that’s your business. However, I would still consider this to be a ‘niche’, and as such I feel that Harmonix now owe us some more British band DLC, because surely those who appreciate British rock bands must be more numerous than those who are into country. I hope. Sure we’ve had some like David Bowie, The Who, The Rolling Stones, Radiohead, The Police, The Stone Roses, and Oasis, but come on, Britain has a rich culture of music that is going massively untapped compared to the number of tracks from North American bands.

I can rattle off a huge list of UK bands that have been cruelly overlooked: Arctic Monkeys, The Bluetones, The Charlatans, Coldplay, Def Leppard, Elbow, Franz Ferdinand (cover in GH1 only), Happy Mondays, Inspiral Carpets, James, Kaiser Chiefs (yes, I know Ruby was in GH3 but that was rubbish), The Kinks, The Kooks, The La’s, Led Zeppelin (unlikely because of master track paranoia), The Libertines, Manic Street Preachers, The Magic Numbers, Morrissey, Nine Black Alps, Ocean Colour Scene, Pink Floyd, Primal Scream, Queen (see below), Razorlight, The Seahorses, Shed Seven, Snow Patrol, StarSailor, Stereophonics, Super Furry Animals, Supergrass, Travis, U2, The Verve, The Zutons – and I’m sure there are loads more.

On both a positive and negative note, I saw that Queen is finally due to make an appearance in Guitar Hero : Metallica – which is both encouraging and perverse. Encouraging that Queen is finally ready to release master tracks in band games, perverse because they have to stow away on a Metallica disk. Queen is a supporting act to Metallica? On whose planet?

I guess it’s because all these decisions are made in the States, where musical taste is somewhat different. For any Americans reading this, how many in the above list had you heard of, and would you be interested in any?

I just happened to see some PSN DLC track prices for both Rock Band and GHWT on a Kotaku article, and they left me rather puzzled. You would have thought that these prices would be fairly homogenised by now, but bizarrely enough I found no fewer than 3 different prices, depending on what system and game you were looking at. Here we go:

“Police Truck” by the Dead Kennedys (Rock Band)
XBOX Live Arcade price: £1.36 (160 points)
Playstation Network price: £0.99

“Hold Up” by the Raconteurs (GHWT)
XBOX Live Arcade Price: £1.36 (160 points)
Playstation Network price: £1.49

In both cases these are full-price tracks – Rock Band regularly has 50% discounted tracks (sometimes time limited) but I’ve ignored those. All the other full-price tracks seem to follow the same pricing structure.

So, some observations:

1. On PSN, a full-price track costs 50% more for GHWT than for Rock Band.
2. On XBLA, a full-price track costs the same for GHWT and Rock Band
3. PSN prices for Rock Band tracks are ~25% cheaper than XBLA
4. XBLA prices for GHWT tracks are ~10% cheaper than PSN

I could attribute the differences between XBLA and PSN on exchange rates, since the PSN I believe starts from USD in all cases, whilst XBLA uses it’s own ‘funny money’ with a fixed exchange rate, but that doesn’t explain why PSN has a 50% difference in price between GHWT and RB. Overall, very odd.

Some of the Rock Band full-album DLC I’ve been really looking forward to is finally getting released next week; The Colour and the Shape by Foo Fighters. Finally I can play Monkey Wrench again (it was in Guitar Hero 2 – although only in cover form), plus the bonus of classics like My Hero, Hey! Johnny Park and – well, there really aren’t any bad tracks on this album.

The only shame is that I have the remastered & extended version of the album, which includes an extra 6 tracks, but none of those have made it in, it’s strictly the original version of the album. Ah well, can’t complain really.

Now, please please please can we have DOA and The Pretender?

Oh, and did you notice they actually spelt ‘Colour’ correctly

Well, Harmonix confirmed the list of 20 ‘free’ DLC tracks included in the Rock Band 2 retail bundle, and here it is:

The 88 – “Sons and Daughters”
Authority Zero – “No Regrets”
Between the Buried and Me – “Prequel To The Sequel”
The Cab – “Bounce”
The Chevelles – “Get It On”
The Cocktail Slippers – “Give It To Me”
Dealership – “Database Corrupted”
Endeverafter – “I Wanna Be Your Man”
The Ghost Hounds – “Ashes To Fire”
Hollywood Undead – “Young”
Kutless – “The Feeling”
The Len Price 3 – “If I Ain’t Got You”
Lesley Roy – “I’m Gone, I’m Going”
Opiate for the Masses – “Burn You Down”
Semi-Precious Weapons – “Magnetic Baby”
Shaimus – “Like a Fool”
Thenewno2″ – Crazy Tuesday”
Tickle Me Pink – “The Time Is Wrong”
Underoath – “Desperate Times, Desperate Measures”
X Japan – “I.V.”

The first surprise that the entire list is made up of lesser known bands – a lot of people, me included, assumed that Harmonix was keeping some headliners in their back pocket to undermine some of the GHWT marketing; perhaps the inexplicably missing tracks from the recent Nevermind DLC for example (Come As You Are and Smells Like Teen Spirit, the two most recognisable tracks, were not part of the Nirvana release). But no, the entire list is staunchly ‘indie’, and it’s annoyed and delighted people in seemingly equal measure.

Firstly, the downside: everyone knows and likes headline bands and signature tracks. In a ‘party’ situation especially, almost no-one picks tracks they don’t know. That’s a shame, because there’s some real gems even in my current listing that occasional players just pass over in favour of playing the same few tracks they know all the time; I do try to counter that by picking different songs when I’m doing vocals even though that’s tough when you’re less familiar. Playing in the World Tour mode with friends resulted in them commenting on tracks they’d never heard of but ended up really liking. But, the fact is when people drop in for a quick party game, there’s a good chance they’ll resist playing anything they don’t already know, so most of these 20 songs will probably never get played in that setting, making them less useful.

On the plus side though, I’ve started listening to these tracks and I already like maybe 70% of them, and a couple have been really excellent. Harmonix have said in the past that one of their goals is to introduce people to new music, and by doing this they certainly tick that box – after all, where else but in a ‘free’ 20-song set could you pack in things people wouldn’t have heard of? Regular DLC from less well known bands tends to be cheaper in Rock Band, but there’s nothing like ‘free’ to really disseminate music.

It was always fun in the first 2 Guitar Hero games to play tracks from small bands the Harmonix team and their friends were members of, like Freezepop and Honest Bob And The Factory to Dealer Incentives, bands I would never have encountered outside indie gigs in Boston, and this track pack follows firmly in that vein. After getting over the initial shock of the fact that I didn’t recognise most of the names on this list, and after listening to some of the tracks, I’ve come around to the positive camp on this. There’s a really good range even in the small number of tracks I’ve listened to so far, some speed metal, pop/rock, blues/funk, indie, punk – so I’m sure most people will find something they like in here; I certainly have. While headline bands would have been an instant PR win, in the grand scheme of things it’s nice to be randomly exposed to some unknown music every so often – after all how would you find new bands you like otherwise?

Looks like I could be getting my wish and Rock band 2 will be out in the UK before the end of the year:

Yep, that’s a UK official Microsoft ad saying it, so I think that’s pretty certain (for 360 at least). So it’s November – unsurprisingly the very time that GH:WT comes out – makes sense.

Woohoo – looks like we can look forward to having 500 tracks to choose from this side of the pond too, instead of a just the measly 400 (!) we’d have with RB1 + DLC. All the refinements to the little niggles should be great too (like drum fills that use the samples from the song, better quickplay etc) We still don’t know what the 20 free DLC tracks are in RB2 yet, my guess is they’ll wait until the GH:WT marketing machine starts up in the USA (which I think is next month), and use that as an extra card.

I’m actually getting better at Won’t Get Fooled Again on Hard on the drums. Every time I play it I can’t help but admire Keith Moon; his drum parts are just so far out there in comparison to almost any other. He might have been a nutter, but he was a genius with a pair of drumsticks.

Oh, Love Spreads is as good as I hoped too, huge fun on guitar and drums and definitely one of my new favourites. And we have a full album of Chili Peppers next week – in a way it’s a shame they chose Blood Sugar Sex Magick, By The Way or Californication would have been my personal choice, but still, it should be good.

For some reason I was suddenly curious as to how much money I’d spent since last December on digital content for the 360, such as XBox Live Arcade titles and more recently Rock Band DLC. Of course you buy things in Microsoft Points on the 360, which like Wii Points and Disney Dollars are designed precisely to disguise how much money you’re actually spending. The PSN has my respect in this regard for taking the brave step of actually pricing things in units of real money. Quite why Microsoft and Nintendo chose to go against the precendent set by every other marketplace in the developed world (except Disneyland, but that’s intentionally ‘wacky’) I’m not sure – I doubt we’d take most high street retailers very seriously if they required us to buy things in ‘Starbucks Bucks’ or ‘HMV Quatloos’.

Anyway, when I totalled it all up, I’ve chugged my way through 13,000 Microsoft Points in 9 months so far, which in the real world is £110.50, and judging by the dates, about half of that has been on Rock Band DLC, the rest being XBLA titles. I’ve spent more on digitally delivered content on my 360 than I have on boxed games (just software, excluding plastic peripherals) – some of that is because I received most of my boxed games as presents, and I picked up a back catalogue from eBay, but even so, I do think my own habits are a sign of how quickly digitally delivered content is becoming accepted.

Small purchases (micropayments is an often used term, although that usually refers to even smaller amounts) are just easy to mentally justify, even if you end up making enough of them to exceed a larger pruchase that you would perhaps think about more carefully. It’s really easy to slap down £1.36 for a new Rock Band track (that’s less than 2 tubes of Pringles), or £6.80 for an XBLA title (Geometry Wars 2 is particularly a no-brainer); it really doesn’t take much to convince you, particularly when you know exactly what you’re getting – after all you can check out the Rock Band tracks on RockBandContent.com and play demos of every XBLA game before you buy.

Taking out the overhead of the retailer and physical distribution makes products cheaper – that’s obvious. Games are, in general, very overpriced – we pay £40 for a boxed game which required the same budget to make as a Hollywood blockbuster I can pick up across the aisle for a tenner. One obvious reason is that market is smaller, another reason is the silly situation we have where a console platform holder takes a huge slice of the pie just for letting developers deploy on their platform.  All these things are interlinked – the audience is smaller partly because the content is so expensive, which leads to content marketed more at the core audience which spends that money, and larger margins required to make back console hardware development costs, etc etc. Nintendo has broken out of that to some degree, but they’ve mostly appealed just to the mass market, leaving most of the core audience on 360 and PS3. Ideally we’d have a situation where the whole spectrum of game players (‘core’ and ‘mass market’ are the most talked about but there are lots of graduations) existed in one place, just like you have with movies, and obviously this is the holy grail that certainly MS and Sony are trying to chase, even though I have serious doubts that we’ll ever get there until the industry rids itself of the counterproductive market segmentation that multiple proprietary consoles creates. I do think that digital distribution helps though, because it disrupts the status quo, creates a more fluid situation that just can’t exist very easily elsewhere, and makes a space for people to experiment more – both as producers and consumers – and to see what works.

I’d love to know the bigger picture of how much money is spent on the likes of XBLA, Steam, PSN etc. I’m sure it’s generally smaller than retail sales, but I’d be interested in knowing the trajectory of those numbers, and in particular which kinds of players they are. Anecdotally I get the impression that digital distribution tends to be good for those ‘ex hardcore’ gamers like me – we don’t buy a ton of games anymore, but like quality bite-sized content and are willing to pay for it. We’re not casual, but we’re not hardcore anymore either.

Anyone else got interesting comparisons of their physical / digital purchase numbers?