Billboard: Rock Band to have 'as many as 5000' tracks available this year
MTV expects Rock Band to activate overdrive this year and have over 5,000 songs available for play, reports Billboard. Developer Harmonix hit its goal of having over 500 songs, spread across discs and DLC, on the music platform by the end of last year.
Although we have no reason to doubt Harmonix's ability to provide content, the math dictates that an average of over 90 songs would need to release every week for the rest of 2009. Even if that figure is mitigated by special discs (like AC/DC) or Rock Band 3 (unlikely), the developer has its work cut out. We've contacted Harmonix to find out if its publisher is being realistic.
Update: Full Harmonix statement after the break.
[Via GameDaily]
Full Harmonix statement:
There has been a lot of discussion over a recent article that stated "MTV said it plans to increase the number of available songs this year to as many as 5,000."
In an effort to clarify and put some context around that number, please see the original quote on ArsTechnica.com from an interview with Alex Rigopulos, CEO and co-founder of Harmonix, during this year's CES.
In that article, Alex stated:
"That said, one of the great promises of the (Rock Band) catalog moving forward, as the catalog expands from 500 songs to 5,000 songs or whatever in the coming years, is that we're going to be less constrained from a genre standpoint, and I think you will see us starting to branch out into... whether it's country or R&B and jazz or funk, or things of that sort. With the critical mass of the "rock" core covered, of course we'll keep expanding it, but the critical mass is covered, so now we can start to branch off in ways that haven't made sense in the past but will make sense moving forward."
