Guitar Hero World Tour Lead Designer Alan Flores is standing behind the decision to produce retail discs while working on a broad downloadable content plan.
Destructoid interviewed Flores to discuss development of the nearly complete Guitar Hero: World Tour to be released on October 26. Coming off the stellar sales of Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, a 40-song standalone disc prominently featuring Aerosmith music, Flores was asked if the studio intended on doing more of these retail games.
In support of the Aerosmith game, which was criticized for not providing enough gameplay outside of new songs, Flores replied, “The Aerosmith game isn’t 40 new songs. It’s a bunch of songs, character animations [and] models. There’s behind the scenes footage of the band, there’s all sorts of cool little info there. It’s a lot more than new songs. And if you were to download the songs and pay whatever it is you pay for them, it would be more expensive that it would be buying a disc.”
Does this mean the disc releases are better deals than DLC?
“Yeah, absolutely,” said Flores. “You’re getting so much more. You’re getting a virtual Aerosmith playing on the stage. If we can add more bonus content on there like behind-the-scenes stuff, how cool would that be? OK fine, we’ll just do DLC stuff!”
Despite the disc loving, Flores says that Neversoft will offer “more great catalog releases, we want to do singles and albums and packs” over the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live.
Another potential option for providing songs is through a subscription service. Activision Publishing Chief Executive Officer Mike Griffith outlined this path at Activision Blizzard’s Analyst Day, saying “Looking even further out, we’re exploring new models, like an annual pass subscription where players can subscribe and get a certain number of songs downloadable each month…. We’ve learned that the consumer still has an insatiable appetite for more. Consumers have downloaded over 20 million individual songs for the franchise, and they still tell us they want more.”
