Compilation of questions answered by HMX (indexed)

[Sayburr]

Now wait a minute, why doesn’t “Black Magic Woman” have the “Gypsy Queen” outro included?

HMXPope said, [“Gypsy Queen”] is actually considered a full song in itself, requiring all the unique licensing/submission work that goes into putting any single song out for DLC.

Sayburr’s interpretation: If the song being release doesn’t specifically say it has both parts, for example “Black Magic Woman/Gypsy Queen”, it will only be the portion listed.

[Sayburr]

What is this I hear about a 3,000 song limit in Rock Band 3?

HMXHenry said, So, there are two responses to this: the short one and the long one.

The short response is, yes, this is a real thing.
The long response is… well, longer.

As I’m sure you’ve all noticed, there is a loading bar that pops up while your DLC library loads in RB3. Those of you with larger quantities of DLC will have longer load times than those of you with less DLC, because each piece of content requires memory to load. This DLC is being loaded at the same time as song audio previews, track information, menu and sorting options, album art and whole lot more. That gets to be an awful lot of information very quickly.

With all the associated tracks, packs, exports and upgrades, there‘s more downloadable content available for your Rock Band library than you’ll find in any other game out there. While this is an awesome problem to have (I’ll take too much content over not enough content any day) managing ALL of that data becomes an issue on such a large scale. In our test environment, we found that working with a cache of over 3,000 songs led to interminable loading times, memory leak induced crashes and random stops and stutters inside of game play, none of which makes for an ideal gaming experience.

In an effort to reduce those drastic side effects, we imposed a limit to how many songs you can have in your active RB library. The 3,000 song cap does not affect how many songs you can store on your hard drive, and it does not take away your capacity to buy additional tracks: it only limits how many tracks you can have active in your RB library at one time. You should be able to delete tracks from RB at will and redownload them at no cost whenever you decide you want to play them again.

To provide a bit of context, we’re still many months away from hitting 3,000 individual songs in Rock Band, depending on the output from the awesome RBN community. Those 3,000 tracks, including all exports and DLC, will take up around 85 GB of hard drive space. At last count, there were roughly 20 DLC completionists across all consoles, and that was when we checked in nearly 6 months ago [October 2010]. And while we plan to continue to release new tracks every week, and I hope all of you plan to continue to pick up the new songs you like, this cap won’t be an issue for 99.9% of you playing RB. But for those few, those proud few, that this will affect, hopefully it’s helpful to know that there is a way to manage that data and keep your RB library intact and manageable.

[Sayburr]

So what exactly happens if you have 3,001. Will it not show #1 - the first you bought - or #3001 - the last you bought? You say this won't affect songs on your hard drive but how do you manage the ones that are active?

HMXHenry said, When you hit 3,000 tracks you should get the message seen in the OP. At that point you can delete songs from your active library but still keep them on your hard drive. So at 3,000 if you decide you'll play those SpongeBob songs least you can delete them and download 3 additional songs. Then when the urge strikes you to ask Where's Gary? you can delete 3 songs and re download the SpongeBob pack from your Download History.

Loading times should not differ drastically from 2,000 to 3,000 songs as far as I know. We have dev kits fully loaded with all available DLC as well as future weeks and we're not much over a minute for load times.

[Sayburr]

Why doesn't the Wii get updated like the other systems?"

HMXPope said, the technical limitations of the Wii system prevent us from releasing updates to our titles on that console.

[Sayburr]

Why doesn’t Harmonix announce releases earlier? Hype would drive interest in future releases, why keep your cards so close to your chest?

HMXHenry said, There's definitely a lot to be said for hype, but I'm a lot more interested in the analysis of hype plus results.

The bulk album announcements are a really interesting test case. We made that announcement at a time when we had a large block of albums lined up and we knew that we had them locked into a calendar. That's not always the case. That's part of the reason why we make announcements on a weekly basis rather than monthly. The schedule is often very fluid and it's not uncommon for weeks to shift on short notice. When we have the luxury of having things secured far enough in advance to promote ahead of time we do sometimes promote ahead of schedule. We don't keep cards close to our chest because we like being sneaky, we do it because artists and labels are protective of information and we can't risk announcing something today that may change tomorrow.

[Sayburr]

Why, after doing this for a few years, doesn’t Harmonix do a better of job of mixing up songs? You would think that Harmonix knows best, that is being silly. When looking at the leaderboards it is obvious they are choosing the wrong songs to release.

HMXHenry said, I think it's safe to say that we do know best. There's obviously plenty of room for improvement, but we're certainly the most informed, the most experienced and the most qualified to determine where we can make those improvements.

A lot of people have been pointing to leaderboard scores and fan sites that track estimated sales metrics and that's great from an amateur analyst point of view but they should not be viewed as hard data. There are a lot of variables that aren't immediately visible and the end results are sometimes tens of thousands off from the reality.

We actually get to see the sales numbers, play though numbers and consistent purchase history when we do steady streaks of old songs, mixes of old and new songs, collections of singles, etc. We didn't get to 3 years of consistent releases and 70 million plus downloads by accident.

I know that people on the internet aren't necessarily the most trusting people in the world, but it's obviously in our best interest to make sure that the community is happy and that DLC sells well. Like I said before, there's obviously room for improvement in promotions, scheduling, marketing, etc. and I'm in those meetings every week lobbying for the community. But in the meantime, trust that we've got access to more data and more reliable data regarding sales, plays, trends and site traffic than anyone else. We're going on a lot more than guesswork here, and while the results may not always be what the forums would expect (or like to see) we're crunching these numbers to make things as appealing as possible to as many people as possible.

[Sayburr]

Talking about hype, do you think the forums are representative of the RB market?

HMXHenry said, Regarding the conversion of forum hype to actual popularity, you would think after the hype for Texas Flood reached a fever pitch that it would have shattered all sales records for any DLC released by any game ever and we'd all be Scrooge McDucking it in vaults full of money.

Forum traffic is definitely not a clear indication of what the rest of the RB community is interested in. The core community here on RockBand.com definitely skews more towards the hardcore. Not everyone is looking for new songs every week, not everyone is playing those songs online and not everyone is as informed as the people here on the forums. Forum reaction and actual sales certainly do not always go hand in hand.

[Bront20]

Why didn't this song get a Pro Guitar upgrade?

HMXHenry said, I had an awesome talk with our Audio QA guys yesterday and learned that they are very particular about which masters they use for Pro Guitar charts. In addition to needing functioning master tracks to chart songs for 5 button game play, they need especially clear guitar masters to reproduce accurate Pro Guitar charts. I'm not sure if that directly affected Landslide but I figured at the very least it would be a handy bit of info to pass along to the community for instances when it looks like we avoid upgrades for the more obvious songs.

HMXHenry said months later. It's unlikely that we'll be able to get a detailed explanation of why one song got a Pro upgrade and others didn't in a regular week. But generally the most iconic songs, or the songs with the most iconic guitar parts are the tracks that get Pro upgrades.

Licensing is certainly involved at some level, as are usability of the masters. The Audio guys have enough experience under their belts that they're able to re create charts from fairly muddy masters, but Pro guitar charts require an additional level of clarity and detail. So a track could have masters clean enough for regular charts but not for Pro. Workload has definitely got to come into play at some point (considering Pro charts take significantly more time to work on), as does the addressable audience (there's a much smaller number of people buying Pro upgrades, so at a certain point there's a question of how many people could buy an upgrade, and would that offset the licensing and production costs).

So yeah, those are the broad strokes for what goes into Pro upgrades: recognizable or iconic songs / guitar parts, usability of masters, timing, audience and cost.

[Sayburr]

Sayburr, you can remove this line when you index it, or replace it with your own post if you want. Felt it was important to add here.

Thanks, I didn't see that one and it does seem important to add. I added a link to it in the OP.

[Bront20]

Thanks, I didn't see that one and it does seem important to add. I added a link to it in the OP.

What? You're not omniscient? You're not even omnipresent? Man, I've lost ALL respect for you.