Harmonix, the studio best known for Rock Band, has had quite a busy year. The development studio has been hard at work on numerous projects, including Disney’s Fantasia: Music Evolved and a new Dance Central game for Microsoft, which will debut on Xbox One in September.

Inbetween these two projects, the team managed to launch a KickStarter campaign to bring back a classic title released for the PlayStation 2 years before, a music/rhythm game called Amplitude.

However, the news hasn’t been entirely good for Harmonix, as the studio faced recent layoffs in the wake of news surrounding Microsoft’s decision to make an Xbox One system bundle without the inclusion of the Kinect motion-reading device – something that’s required for both of the company’s forthcoming titles.

Harmonix staffers, namely former director of publishing and PR John Drake and publicist Nick Chester, responded negatively to the news with simple “Oh, great, super great” and “Oh, good” Twitter responses to the news. However, Alex Rigopulos, the chairman and CCO of Harmonix, explained that Microsoft’s decision wasn’t as harmful as the studio believed.

“No,” he stated. “We’ve worked with Microsoft for years, and we had some awareness of the plan. So it wasn’t a surprise actually.”

The developer plans to keep its goals focused on experiences that involve the Kinect, despite the decision. “Look,” Rigopulos replies. “I basically view it as our responsibility to make games that are sufficiently compelling for players to be motivated to pick up the hardware they need to play them. If you look back to the last generation, the original Kinect was not bundled with the 360. It was independent, and still millions of people bought the Kinect so they could play Dance Central, among others. Our hope is that Dance Central Spotlight and Fantasia: Music Evolved will be good enough to sell the hardware. We’ll be trying to make the games that make that worthwhile.”

Harmonix also faced some critiques in regards to needing to launch a KickStarter campaign for Amplitude, to which Rigopulos was quick to respond. “One of the things that we really underestimated was how polarized the Kickstarter community has become following events like the Facebook acquisition of Oculus, for example,” he says. “A lot of people felt betrayed by that. Something that we didn’t expect, but that turned out to be a significant factor, was that a lot of that audience felt almost insulted that a company like Harmonix would be turning to Kickstarter.

“People have the image of us as this company sitting on big piles of Rock Band money, and that we don’t need crowdfunding for our games. But it’s just not the truth. The fact is that our hit games were years ago, and we’re just like any other independent studio – we need to find ways to fund our games.”

We certainly wish the developer the best of luck. Fantasia and Dance Central will release later this year, with Amplitude following sometime in 2015.

Source: GamesIndustry International