Harmonix, the Epic Games-owned studio behind the popular rhythm game franchise Rock Band, has officially announced that it is wrapping up its weekly DLC releases for 2015’s Rock Band 4. It will now focus on supporting Fortnite Festival, instead.
Rock Band 4 was released nearly a decade ago in October 2015, and was a return for the franchise five years after the release of Rock Band 3 and the crash of plastic instrument games like Guitar Hero and DJ Hero. While Rock Band 4 wasn’t able to rebuild the once large plastic instrument genre of rhythm games, it ended up with a dedicated community of players who kept enjoying the game and buying DLC songs for it even as it became harder and harder to track down replacement instrument controllers. Now, eight years and nearly 3,000 DLC songs later, Harmonix is moving on.
In a January 17 post on the official Harmonix blog from Rock Band 4‘s product manager Daniel Sussman, the studio revealed that the DLC music released on January 25 will be the last ever for Rock Band 4. Sussman’s post did clarify that all other live services, including Rivals seasons and online play, will continue as normal. But there will be no new tracks coming to RB4 after this month.
Sussman also made it clear that all the songs players own in Rock Band 4 will not be going anywhere, adding that you’ll be able to keep rocking out to your previously purchased songs “for as long as you like.”
Fortnite Festival is the future
As for what Harmonix is working on now, well, that’s clear if you’ve been paying attention to Fortnite lately. Epic’s popular battle royale juggernaut expanded in December with the addition of three new games built inside Fortnite. One of those is Fortnite Festival, a controller-based rhythm game featuring popular songs from different genres. Harmonix is the team behind that game and it’s what the studio will be focusing on post-Rock Band 4.
“Looking ahead, the Harmonix team has been hard at work over the last two years to develop Fortnite Festival,” said Sussman. “[It] brings rhythm action gaming (and more) to the Fortnite ecosystem. It’s free to play, we have a rotating selection of songs that you can play (for free) anytime. If you are a fan of the rhythm game category, Fortnite Festival is the place to be.”
And Sussman once again confirmed that support for RB4 instruments is coming soon to Festival, so you don’t need to “hang up your guitars just yet.”
“Working in support of the Rock Band community has been a high point in my professional life,” Sussman explained.
“We deliberated long and hard about how to frame the last blast of RB4 DLC of this era. The last two weeks will feature some tear-jerkers that sum up our feelings about this moment. We thank you for your commitment to and passion for this wonderful game. Long Live Rock and Roll.”
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