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Rock Band 4 to be delisted on tenth anniversary following the expiration of its licenses
(www.gamesindustry.biz)
this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2025
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Now's a good opportunity to promote Clone Hero
Does Clone Hero have the characters dancing in the background like on regular Guitar Hero? I'm all about the immersion.
It'll never be quite the same without the master tracks.
For customs? Yeah. But pretty much every master used in the RB or GH games have been ripped and are available for use there too
I’m sad I never got this to fully work with my Td 17
What's not working? If any amount of midi is being picked up then you may need to remap, otherwise you might need drivers for the usb, or need to use a hardware usb midi box instead of usb
The drum functionality was new when I tried. This was years ago.
Man, this sucks. I haven't played any games like this in a while (i legit have my guitar hero mounted on the wall) but it sucks to see something like this going away
I've heard good things about YARG (yet another rhythm game). Basically an open source rock band clone on PC.
There's also Clone Hero
Frets on Fire is the one I knew of back when Guitar hero was at its peak
It should not be legal for a product such as this to just cease existing due to an agreement between IP owners ending.
It's like Disney saying "We agree you can make this Mickey Mouse game using our characters, but it can only be sold for 2 years." Fucking why?
"Because in 2 years the value of the product might be higher and we expect to always be paid more, regardless of the current deal we are making today."
~Disney, since it was established as a business
~~Makes sense they bought Star Wars, so they can legally say “I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it further.”~~
[User was moused for this comment]
Uh oh. You quoted a Disney movie. Prepare to be litigated.
I’ve got a bad feeling about this…
Except if you bought the game you still own a copy, they're just not allowed to sell new copies.
There are a bunch of Marvel games that are exactly like this.
Somewhat related. I tried to watch Guava Island, which was apparently only made available for Amazon for a limited time, then it just disappeared.
I think it should be legal to download or stream any of that stuff that's no longer available.
It's certainly ethical, if not legal.
You could make a good argument in court, too. Hard to show damages when there's no possibility of profit because you're not selling it.
That's actually a very bad argument in court. Taking things off the market to drive scarcity and boost sales at a later date is a normal and common business tactic. See: the McRib, Pumpkin Spice Lattes, and the Disney Vault.
I can't name any cases off the top of my head, but I don't see a reasonable court equating hypothetical future earnings with present losses.
Like if it was "he stole my harvest of beans that I was going to sell at market" then yeah the harm is obvious, but when it's "well I'm not selling the beans now, and I'm not planning on selling them in the future, but someday I might, therefore no one else should be able to appreciate beans in the meantime" that's ridiculous. Especially since piracy is not theft; the number of beans has not changed.
I think there's a difference between unavailable and limited availability.
There are some old games that may never come back. In many cases, there's no agreed owner. Imagine if something became public domain after a short period of no use (5 years, 10 years maybe).
Rights-holders can make these products available whenever they want. Nintendo added many old "abandonware" games to their subscription catalog that had been unavailable for much longer than ten years. If someone else is putting them out for free, they're stealing Nintendo's lunch.
There are very few cases where copyrighted material would have no owner and no legal mechanism to determine ownership.
Not saying I support the current system. I think current US copyright law is ridiculous and a net negative for our culture. Just clarifying that "Well, no one was selling it" is not a legally defensible position when it comes to copyrighted work.
It absolutely isn't a legal defense. You're right.
I'm saying it should be legal. Starting now, since digital is a standard. Nintendo needs to put it out or let people share it. They can have 10 years (or the highest of 5 years from now/10 years from when it was last available). Something like that.
The TV movie standard of everything being available should be the video game standard.
The TV movie standard of everything being available
TVs and movies are not universally available. Dogma is a pretty famous case of being universally unavailable for over 15 years. It was only announced this year that a new licensing deal had been reached. There are plenty of lesser-known shows and movies that are just gone forever.
But that is a case in favor of piracy and physical media. Films like 1922's Nosferatu only survived to today because of bootlegging. If we're expecting Netflix to: one, be around as a company for 80 years until their films enter into public domain; and two, maintain their originals on their servers for that entire time, then we're setting ourselves up for some pretty big disappointments and some rather huge holes in our cultural history.
The McRib is actually an awful example for this, because McD’s primary deciding factor is the price of pork. When pork prices drop, McD revives the McRib. They want to manufacture them as cheaply as possible. Then when the prices start to climb again, they pull it from the menu.
That’s why they don’t do big “it’s coming back on this date, and leaving on this date” announcements ahead of time, because those announcements would affect the pork prices as pig farmers would anticipate the upcoming large McD orders, and subsequent dips when they stop selling. By the time the McRib is on the menu, McD has already been buying pork for a while. And by the time it gets pulled from the menu, McD has already stopped buying a while ago. So their profit margins won’t be affected by them adding/pulling it from their menu.
Taking things off the market to drive scarcity and boost sales at a later date is a ~~normal~~ bullshit and ~~common~~ anti-consumer business tactic.
It doesn't stop existing, you just can't buy it.. Not great but not unreasonable.
Wouldn’t the solution just end up screwing artists who have to give up their song in perpetuity? You can have those buy pay way more
And this is why disc games should never go away.
Don't worry, the games industry has you covered on that now. They just release games that are broken or half-finished without the day 1 patch, but then allowing it to update removes all of the licensed content.
The digital download isn't going away either (yet).
What like the songs or Kindle books that can be removed from your library next time your computer logs onto the Internet due to a licensing dispute?
With more games and systems requiring online access every X number of days, downloads don't mean shit.
u keep everything you bought on rock band it has been that way since rock band 3 shut down. even when metallica was pulled from the stores absolutely nobody lost the metallica songs they had bought
For about 1 year my two sons and I played Rock Band, mostly The Beatles, everyday when they came home from school. At least an hour each day. We played other versions of Rock Band, but the Beatles was easily our favorite.
It directly led one of them to learn the piano and eventually get a master's degree in composing, and the other to enjoy playing in bands and performing in musical theatre.
So uh, happy... anniversary... I guess?
This is one of the weird aspects of games that seems to make no sense because of archaic laws that never entered the 20th century, nevermind the 21st. It seems to be about manufacturing new copies of the already made game, not selling them. So it only affects digital sales, I would assume because of their "creation" on a new sale, every physical game copy was already manufactured and out there, nothing changes there.
I have so many good memories of playing Rock Band in college. I just picked this up for PS4 for like $10, but it looks like the instruments are going to cost an arm and a leg...
Just like being in a real rock band!
End of an era 🥲
Obligatory plug: Rock Band 3 Deluxe mod, Rock Band 4 Deluxe mod
Shoutout to the Milohax team
Too bad PS4 emulation isn't quite there yet. You can, however, pirate the fuck out of the earlier games, DLC and all. Truly a better way to play, cause that DLC was hella expensive.
Rock Band 4 does get in-game now on ShadPS4, but it's a long ways off from playable.
https://github.com/shadps4-compatibility/shadps4-game-compatibility/issues/1165
And the songs will start to become unavailable to purchase over the next 9 years. I guess it's a good reminder for me to buy all the songs I want to get.
check this weekly
Thanks! I actually just bought one of the those that are delisting soon a couple nights ago. So that makes me feel better. I'll have to go through this first list tonight.
i bought a bunch too i was going to buy just from the list then got distracted and bought a shit load of packs 😂