As a real life musician I jumped straight on the band wagon (no pun intended) when rhythm games came to the latest generation of consoles. Combining my love of music and games seemed ideal to me, so I snapped up Guitar Hero II as soon as it came out. Despite a lot of fellow musicians/gamers not seeing the point in trying to combine two hobbies, I loved it. I was hopelessly addicted and continued to rack up the retail titles. Then came Rock Band; I bought it but I was skeptical. With so many Guitar Hero titles emerging did we really need more? The market suggested yes, but this started my decline of interest in the genre.

A few years on and we now have Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Band Hero, DJ Hero, Singstar, and a wealth of others. With most of these titles now leaking onto portables and DLC being released at up to weekly intervals you really have to ask yourself if it’s time to give up and move on.

As far as I can see it’s exploitation. The producers of these games wrote some clever coding, yes, but with so many sequels and expensive DLC they are milking the cash cow dry before looking at other options. You really have to question whether half the games released are even sequels; in many they seem to have solely run some new songs through their software and regurgitated potential DLC as a retail game. With the DLC on these games being hideously overpriced in most circumstances and not providing new achievements/trophies you have to be a immense fan of that star to buy it. This leads to retail games stacking up because people are more willing to pay for a full game.

I browse through my games news at least once a week. I was horrified to find Guitar Hero DLC (for both consoles and the iPhone), Rock Band DLC, Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock and DJ Hero 2 all stealing headline space in one week. This was not in any way a special week for rhythm games and yet such a limited genre has managed to obtain that much coverage. It is impressive, but is it deserved? It really made it apparent how much this area of gaming has expanded without ever having to stop for much “development time”.

Obviously, for gamers new to the genre it’s great that they have a wide choice. However, if you mastered the skills long ago and are just farming these games for the points then please stop and think if your cash could be better spent, even if it’s for the sake of your own enjoyment! If we want to get the developers back to the drawing board and coming out with new and fresh ideas then this constant churning out of essentially the same game needs to stop, and that starts with us.