@unclebenny: Come on, it's never been proven in a court of law that he killed that girl.

The Harmonix guys seem great and talented, but they have aligned themselves too much with Microsoft and the success, or lack thereof, of the Kinect. It's nice to have a niche and all, but it's also important to understand the realities of the market around you. And really, the writing has been on the wall for quite sometime that the public was dissatisfied with Kinect and momentum was swinging towards Sony.

#Barkervillesavesjobs

@foggen: his denial is basically an admission.

It isnt scrapped.

A reasonably compassionate and a under the surface contemplative type? Unless I'm miss reading some hostility here.

I blame this solely on John Drake's travel and Diet Coke expenses.

John Drake's Diet Coke budget is going to be the death of Harmonix.

Dude, I know giant bomb has personal ties with Pope and Drake and others, and that Alex used to work there, but something seems hella sketchy over there right now.

Why is there no faith in Fantasia? Investors still took a huge chance and made Dance Central 1-3 on the 360, a system with a large install base where a majority didn't have the required peripheral, and yet found a way to (at least for the first two games) sell gangbusters. Dance Central is probably the reason Kinect still exists as a thing today, actually.

And here we are with 4ish (again, I have no solid numbers, just an educated guess) million Xbox Ones out there that came with the damn peripheral you need to play the game. And even if only 10% (400,000) of that install base bought that game at launch, you'd still end up making $24 million alone, right there. Not GREAT numbers, by any means, but I'd think enough to stay afloat while finishing Chroma and Amplitude.

The timing on the end of the Kickstarter, closeness to E3/Fantasia's biggest push, and apparent scrapping/reimagining of Chroma while Record Run just kind of sits and fails is... all a bit coincidental.

If they're teetering on the fiscal edge as bad as this makes me think, I can't see Harmonix being around by Fall 2015

The 5 minutes I played of Chroma alpha were really cool and interesting, bummer to see it scrapped.

I'm sure Drake and Pope are fine, but, uh, on the off chance that they aren't, Giant Bomb is currently expanding, you know...

But fuck it, ROCK BAND 4 STILL CONFIRMED because I BELIEVE.

In the wake of Drake's departure, I reiterate my misgivings about Harmonix.

@ottoman673: Your numbers are based off Harmonix getting $60 per sold copy of game. The reality is that the reseller (the store you buy from) is buying the game from the publisher/distributor for $30. The publisher gets a cut of that so really if Harmonix is lucky they would see $15 (assuming a generous 50/50 split between them and Disney) per unit sold. Using your estimate of a 10% attach rate that would give them $6 million in revenue from it. They have already said it will cost more than the $775,000 they asked for to fund Amplitude. I can't see how they could make their money back and survive off of $6 million in revenue while trying to get another game out the door.

I wonder how much Rock Band DLC affected them because I see two possible paths: 1). They kept making content (long) after it was profitable to do so just because they wanted to support the game and/or already had the licenses and deals in place or 2). They wanted to move on and get everyone working on new projects so they stopped Rock Band DLC and underestimated how important/necessary that revenue stream was.