Chris Rigopulos, Vice President of Strategy and Business Development for Harmonix, recently gave a long ranging interview about the business of Rock Band. When asked about profitability of retail releases versus DLC, he confirmed that Rock Band 4 is not on the slate for 2011.

We’ve aggressively pursued a music platform strategy for a couple of reasons, said Rigopulos. First, ongoing music content was the obvious way to extend the life of the game and sustain interest. We’re trying to accommodate very diverse musical tastes among our fans, so we have to produce a lot of music in order to achieve a broad enough selection of music to keep our fans happy.

Second, DLC is the most efficient way to satisfy this demand. We can put 83 great songs on the Rock Band 3 disc, but nobody loves the entire soundtrack. They love some, like others, maybe find a new track they enjoy, and could do without the rest. A large, diverse DLC library allows people to customize their music content in the game to suit their individual preferences. You can’t achieve that efficiently with frequent retail disc releases, he added. Third, a big part of what we do is work closely with the artist community to understand their objectives and priorities, and coordinate our DLC releases accordingly. The digital platform gives us the schedule flexibility to pull that off. Disc releases are not well-suited to matching the natural rhythms of major events in the music industry. You can see this strategy in action during May, with the Foo Fighters and Lady Gaga both promoting new records and simultaneously releasing some of those tracks via Rock Band.

Finally, comparing profitability of discs vs. DLC is really an apples-to-oranges thing. Ideally, they should be complementary parts of the whole, he continued. DLC represents an ongoing opportunity to improve the economics of the disc release. This is substantial enough in our case that it might affect how we think about our retail strategy. For example, the price for Rock Band 3 was recently reduced to $19.99. A price cut like that has much more compelling economics when you consider that each unit sold represents the potential creation of a new DLC customer.

For all of these reasons, we re not planning a Rock Band 4 disc release in 2011. Rock Band 3 is a big game with lots of available music content and lots of new goals and challenges. We want to give our fans the time to explore that fully. But rest assured that Harmonix is still developing new ideas and concepts to advance the Rock Band franchise, and we look forward to sharing those when the time is right, concluded Rigopulos.

Source: GameInformer