For those who haven’t been following along the entire time, it might come as a surprise to know that one of the last bastions of plastic video game instruments, Rock Band 4, has been getting regular, weekly DLC song updates for the last eight years. It’s a fact that many are learning just now, thanks to developer Harmonix announcing that next week’s DLC drop on January 25th will be the game’s last.
The game’s Product Manager Daniel Sussman penned the news in a blog post, revealing that while the days of new songs being added to the game as DLC are over, all other live services including Rivals seasons, online play and more will continue to operate as usual.
An Update on Rock Band 4 DLChttps://t.co/F3wcX3F88L
— Rock Band (@RockBand) January 17, 2024
“Working in support of the Rock Band community has been a high point in my professional life – wading through the thousands of song requests we get, working through what songs to pursue and release, it’s all hard work but also really satisfying,” Sussman writes.
“Taking a longer look back, I see the Rock Band DLC catalog as a huge achievement in persistence and commitment – over the years we’ve cleared, authored and released nearly 3,000 songs as DLC and well over 3,000 if you include all the game soundtracks. That’s wild. Many of you reading this own a good chunk of this content and we remain committed to protecting that investment – to be very clear, you can play the songs you own within Rock Band 4 for as long as you like.”
The good news is, Harmonix is now very much dedicated to developing and expanding Fornite’s new Fortnite Festival mode, which essentially translates the Rock Band experience to Epic’s metaverse-esque game/platform. Better yet, support for Rock Band 4 instruments is on the way and at least one peripheral manufacturer has hinted that it’s got something to share on the subject of plastic guitars in the very near future.
