Hey gang!
This is Eric Pope from Harmonix. All of us at the studio are beyond thrilled to announce today that Rock Band will make its triumphant return to living rooms this year with Rock Band 4 for PlayStation 4!
I’ve spent years as a community manager playing our various installments of Rock Band around the world with fans at every event you can imagine. I’m as excited as you are to have the next evolution of the franchise, Rock Band 4, on the current generation of console hardware.
Since we released Rock Band 3 in 2010, Harmonix has branched out, developing projects in a number of new areas including motion control, PC and even VR. With every new project, the studio has challenged the perception of what a “music game” can be, and learned a lot in the process. With those lessons under our belt, we felt like we were prepared to dive back into our beloved Rock Band series, and actually push the genre forward. We’ve landed on a design that doubles down on the core Rock Band experience fans love, while innovating on gameplay in some super exciting ways that we’ll have more to say about a little later this year.
I know what you’re wondering right about now:
“How about all those Rock Band DLC songs I bought on my PlayStation 3?”
That’s a fair question! We’ve always been committed to the idea that Rock Band is a platform, and as such Rock Band 4 will support all your previous DLC purchases at no additional cost! (Be sure to thank our friends at PlayStation, because we couldn’t pull this off without significant work from them!)
Meet the Team
The Rock Band 4 team is comprised of an immensely talented group of veteran game developers. I’m honored and humbled to work with these folks every day. This video piece will give you a chance to meet some of the passionate people behind the game and understand why we think the time is right for Rock Band’s return.
Make no mistake, Rock Band 4 isn’t a simple “next-gen remaster” of an existing game- it’s the next step forward for the series. I can’t wait to rock out with you later this year!
I really want to know how they plan on making the rockband 1 disc songs transfer (sense you had to put the disc into the system and it copied the tracks from the disc to the system)
And reading the comments made me laugh, they are currently working with both microsoft and sony to get existing controllers to work, the playstation ones are easier to do, the microsoft ones are apparently more of a challenge.
And to those who complain about loosing songs because they switched from microsoft to sony, no they won’t link the 360 purchases to the ps4 version, that would be stupid.
Last but not least, export of rockband 3 tracklist? and Can’t wait to finally break the 1000 mark on songs (945~ish and i’m expecting about 60-70 on disc tracks at least)
I can’t wait! I love music games and it’s been ages since a good one has come out. My hearts thumping just thinking about it! I love vocals the most so I’m wondering what ways that can be innovated.
Also, the one thing I know I’d like to see is a way to stream purchased songs. Back on PS3 I had to lug the whole machine around to play at a friends house. It would awesome if there was a way to stream music I’d purchased to my friends’ systems so we could enjoy all the music we buy when we visit for parties.
Oh Harmonix you sweet sweet loving company. I knew there was a reason to stay loyal to you. My wallet and close to 1000 DLC songs thank you.
I do have a question though. Will you guys be making some sort of easy transfer tool? Or maybe make it so that we can manually move those files over? I know the ball might be in sony’s court for that one, but nearly 30 GB of data would be much better to handle manually than to have to redownload again.
Great question. We’re still working through the logistics of all of this right now. Just to set your expectations, it will most likely need to be downloaded.