Guitar Hero and Rock Band sales down but downloads soar

While you might be hard stretched to find someone who hasn’t enjoyed rocking out on one of the Guitar Hero or Rock Band incarnations, US sales data has actually shown a drop of revenue by nearly half this year.

Year on year sales show a 49% drop on copies shifting from the shelves, calling the idea that games are recession-proof into question.

However, more interesting than this is that downloadable tracks are storming ahead, with Rock Band racking up 40 million downloads in total.

Similarly to the turnaround in the music industry, it seems that gamers are truly embracing downloads rather than going out to buy the latest hard copy.

Certainly with these music games, it appears people would rather stick with their old copies and just top them up with new songs. And that seems fair enough to us.

Let us know what you think to the future of music games below – are downloads the way forward?

Via: ElectricPig

Dan Grabham Editor-in-Chief

About

Dan is Editor-in-chief of Stuff, working across the magazine and the Stuff.tv website.  Our Editor-in-Chief is a regular at tech shows such as CES in Las Vegas, IFA in Berlin and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as well as at other launches and events. He has been a CES Innovation Awards judge. Dan is completely platform agnostic and very at home using and writing about Windows, macOS, Android and iOS/iPadOS plus lots and lots of gadgets including audio and smart home gear, laptops and smartphones. He's also been interviewed and quoted in a wide variety of places including The Sun, BBC World Service, BBC News Online, BBC Radio 5Live, BBC Radio 4, Sky News Radio and BBC Local Radio.

Areas of expertise

Computing, mobile, audio, smart home