Open source Rock Band engine?

[Marc10edora]

I was thinking that it would be cool if Rock Band made their source engine open to the public, like Unreal or Half Life. That way users could be able to load their own songs into the game and create the riffs themselves. Then upload it to XBox Live as DLC for a small fee. The only problems I see wrong with it is all the licensing issues with the record companies and the possibility that their will be a lot of poorly put together tracks for the game. Maybe to fix that, Harmonix could screen the uploaded content and only allow the best as DLC or use a rating system like amazon.com/EBay that shows the quality of the person that made the track. In return profits could be split up by Harmonix, the record company, and the creator.

These are the benifits that I see:

1)Harmonix will get their money without having to hire extra people to make new tracks.

2)More songs will be available as DLC

3)Ensures that Rock Band will be played for a very long time

3)

[emburn]

Maybe if there was a PC version of the game, but I think there would be too many licensing/copyright/$$$ issues to allow such a thing.

[Ardius]

I was thinking that it would be cool if Rock Band made their source engine open to the public, like Unreal or Half Life. That way users could be able to load their own songs into the game and create the riffs themselves. Then upload it to XBox Live as DLC for a small fee. The only problems I see wrong with it is all the licensing issues with the record companies and the possibility that their will be a lot of poorly put together tracks for the game. Maybe to fix that, Harmonix could screen the uploaded content and only allow the best as DLC or use a rating system like amazon.com/EBay that shows the quality of the person that made the track. In return profits could be split up by Harmonix, the record company, and the creator.

These are the benifits that I see:

1)Harmonix will get their money without having to hire extra people to make new tracks.

2)More songs will be available as DLC

3)Ensures that Rock Band will be played for a very long time

3)
Some points for the disadvantages you listed (why only give points for benefits?):

1. Someone else doing the work for Harmonix is like how Neversoft got modders to write some of the charts for them - it leads to un-realistic or not-so-fun charts. Leave it to the pros.
2. Related to point one, but the note charts are going to be varying levels of quality from different people creating them. Just like mods are varying levels of quality for other games. Although youve sort of solved this issue with a rating system, surely it would be better for all of the DLC to be good quality rather than have loads of DLC but of varying quality?
3. I somewhat doubt it would be any cheaper and it'd be likely to be more expensive, as I imagine the record companies would demand that users would have to pay for this kind of thing in the form of a patch (to make up for the "lost potential sales")

Besides, its not going to happen because of licsensing issues.

[Parodygm]

The only problems I see wrong with it is all the licensing issues with the record companies

Yes, I think that might prove to be a slight problem. Probably an insurmountable one actually. Knowingly profiting from the illegal distribution of copyrighted materials isn't high on Harmonix's "to do" list I'm guessing.