If you look at the way the gaming community talks about Guitar Hero and Rock Band, you’d think that the latter is dominating the former. Especially on Destructoid, people were quick to jump ship from Activision to EA when Rock Band was released, and often looks upon Guitar Hero nowadays with disdain.
Activision probably doesn’t care, however, if its claim of domination in the music game market is to be believed. According to CEO Bobby Kotick, Guitar Hero is currently outselling Rock Band by 600%.
“We’re outselling [Rock Band] 6:1. When you think about the access we have to 30 percent of the world’s music at Universal, we have a unique advantage there.
I would also say when you look at resources, you know, our next-nearest competitor has a couple of hundred people working on these projects, we have close to 2,000 people just dedicated to the Guitar Hero note tracking, introduction of new hardware, introduction of new software, and so we just have a lot more in the way of resources available to us to continue to dominate the category.”
Of course, Activision is helped by the fact that Guitar Hero has two sequels and a couple of spin-offs while so far, the younger Rock Band franchise consists of two installments, one of which was only released recently. That said, Guitar Hero was the first music game since DDR to make a huge mainstream splash, so it’s not surprising to see that Rock Band hasn’t been able to replace it in the minds of the average consumer.
