Green Day: Rock Band more familiar to 'core audience' than The Beatles, MTV Games says
The Beatles are a tough act to follow. And so, several weeks from the release of Green Day: Rock Band, publisher MTV Games has some promoting to do. MTV Games GM Scott Gutherie recently explained the reasoning behind picking the younger, less "classic rock"–oriented band for its next single-act music game following The Beatles: Rock Band.
"We were pleased with the performance of Beatles: Rock Band, but we were expecting higher sales," Guthrie said. "Our core audience of 16- to 34-year-old males are much more familiar with Green Day music than The Beatles." Targeting the core gaming audience with a band active during their lifetimes certainly seems like a sensible business move, though it does signal a move away from the kind of market expansion MTV and Harmonix were attempting with Beatles. However, Guthrie's suggestion that "Green Day probably has a much higher awareness than perhaps The Beatles did" seems like a stretch. Everyone knows The Beatles.
The clear market advantage that the Green Day game does have is the benefit of being compatible with Rock Band's existing and ever-growing library, as its tracks are exportable (for a fee) to Xbox 360 and PS3 hard drives and playable in the main iterations of the series. Though Guthrie didn't say as much, it's possible Beatles sales suffered because the game was a standalone project, which didn't mesh well with the Rock Band ethos and its core demographic.
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