Have Rhythm Games Peaked?

As those who know me can attest, I've been a vocal, long-time fan of rhythm games. I imported Japanese copies of the Bust A Groove games for the PlayStation, at E3 I once unsuccessfully begged a KOEI PR rep to give me a piece of Gitaroo Man booth art, and the fact that I was among the first press to ferret out the original Guitar Hero in Kentia Hall at E3 2005 is a point of petty pride for me. As exciting as it's been to see the genre's popularity blow up and for the good folks at Harmonix to finally see some well-deserved success, even I get worn out on the genre after a while. The dueling releases of Rock Band and Guitar Hero for the past two years, while totally awesome, have been friggin' exhausting and fraggin' expensive. The competition has been great, but I just don't know if I can sustain two of these games every year like this.

Confirming what we all kind of already knew, Electronic Entertainment Design and Research analyst Jesse Divnich released a report today predicting “decline by more than 50 percent series-over-series for November” for Guitar Hero World Tour. Though the availability of crazy Black Friday Guitar Hero III deals is credited with stealing some of World Tour's thunder, Divnich suspects that the mass-market demand for both Guitar Hero and Rock Band is “reaching its peak.” Simply put, people are getting worn out on all these plastic guitars, though that's not to say that rhythm games are going to go the way of increasingly obscure extreme sports games. A comparison is drawn in the report to the Dance Dance Revolution franchise, which “is still today a very profitable franchise for Konami, even though that series reached its peak a long time ago.”

Divnich predicts that we'll be seeing both Guitar Hero and Rock Band games for a good 10 years from now, which is kind of mind-blowing to consider. Will we have run out of music by then? Will you still care?