A billion dollar franchise, The Rock Band has gone on to sell over 18 million units worldwide and over 130 million individual song downloads. This is one of the biggest cult music gaming hits that has been immensely popular with both Xbox as well as the PS gaming fans.Their latest Rock Band 4 announced this year in Oct had more than 1700 songs and was available with the wireless Stratocaster guitar bundle.
Now with the Oculus announcement yesterday, this is surely going to be a major milestone for Harmonix games. It also gives the Oculus fans a reason to smile since Harmonix was already working with its SONY fans to introduce the Harmonix music VR for the Playstation VR platform. This announcement yesterday with regards to Rock Band VR experience is definitely a big win for the Oculus fans, although there are quite a few folks including myself who were expecting more from the “Surpirsing Announcement” yesterday at the game show awards. There was a big hope this entire week that Oculus would be announcing the pre-orders at this event. Unfortunately, it is clear that we will have to wait till 2016 Q1.
Harmonix music VR was announced earlier this year in June marked the company’s entry into VR. The product for the Playstation VR platform was more around VR Music visualization. According to a developer from Harmonix, It takes any song you give it and generates a unique, musically-driven event sequence. The resulting experiences range from subtly magical to outright psychedelic, depending on the world you select. Sometimes fireflies show up to compliment a relaxing melody, and sometimes stars descend to engulf you in synesthetic spirals of color. Zed’s “Clarity” for example would be a novel visualization experience on the music VR.
The Rock Band game is however a more engaging experience in that it provides you with an experience where you’re playing guitar and looking out on a crowd of fans through the Oculus Rift. It also leverages the Oculus touch controllers as shown in the video below.
It will be interesting to see if and when the game is made available to the Playstation VR fans since Harmonix has always released the offering for both SONY and XBOX fans in the past as with its Rock Band 4 product launch. If the game is release as an exclusive for Oculus next year, it will definitely be a big win for Oculus and disheartening for the Playstation VR fans who have been big fans of Rock Band in the past. Any switchers yet from PS VR to Oculus?
Had ps3 rb3 over 800 songs I payed for,ps3 blow up so I got ps4 with rb4 trying to download my songs.I love my songs and love playing rock band4,but like to have my songs back. Can you help? There on psn list but want me to pay for them again not. I been with ps3 along time. Am 51 all I got to do now days.