How The Huang Brothers Bootstrapped Guitar Hero To A Billion Dollar Business

It's easy in retrospect to say "Everyone wants to be a rock star, so sure it was going to be a hit!" but that need wasn't obvious. (And in even more retrospect, the need only lasted a few years, so it was kind of fragile.)

I guess one lesson is that just making the best product you can increases the chance of it catching on; we certainly were all passionate about it and tried to perfect every facet of it. Once we got to the point where the second-to-second experience was really satisfying, we knew we were making a great game, but honestly we were still rolling the dice.

Our hope at Harmonix was that before that curve of interest fell off, we'd latch onto another curve by making Rock Band be a core way that people experienced rock music in general; you would expect that your favorite group would release a Rock Band version of their new single, and they'd expect that they'd have to do it to satisfy their fans, and it would become sort of self-sustaining. That was one big idea behind Rock Band Network. In retrospect it failed to accomplish that, but I think it was a really good try to keep the genre sustainable for more than a few years.

Note that we still make money from selling downloadable content; there are thousands of downloadable songs available, and of course sales have gone down some since the good old days, but they're still a money-maker. So people are still playing it.