Professional Plagiarism
November 18th, 2007In any case: it’s not the point of the article, but does it seem strange to anyone else that 6 tracks are shared between Rock Band and Guitar Hero III? Of all the songs in the past 5 decades, Neversoft and Harmonix picked 6 relatively obscure songs (ok, I’ll give you Sabotage) between them? I’m not sure if I’d chalk it up to creative competition or what, but I’d have hoped for more differentiation - especially seeing as how the side-by-side makes it clear that these are basically the same game. (Especially if you’re not in a position to have 4 friends also buying their own $200 game to play with you.)
Posted in Geoff, Microsoft, Xbox 360 |
November 18th, 2007 at 9:37 pm
Huh? Why is this so strange? How is it any different than two different movies from a similar genre using the same licensed song?
I don’t think Rock Band fans will mind at all, even if they already played the songs in Guitar Hero. After all, the point is being able to play the songs with a whole band, or at the very least you’re able to tackle the songs from another angle by yourself (as drummer, bassist, or vocalist, as well as the lead guitar). Just because the GH franchise got to a song “first” means they shouldn’t be able to let people play it in within the Rock Band context?
And let’s be realistic… it’s not as if the entire track list is the same. We’re talking 6 songs out of about 130 total songs (if you combine just GH3 and Rock Band. If you add in the other GH’s it’s obviously even more songs). So 120+ different songs isn’t enough for you?
November 19th, 2007 at 12:22 am
I’m not complaining that there are duplicate songs. I’m saying that it’s a rather odd coincidence, and in fact, unlikely enough that it suggests that there’s something more to their inclusion here than pure random chance.
Consider that iTunes’s song library is currently about 14 million songs (hardly all of the songs out there, of course, but a decent sample). If only 10% were rock music, and only 10% of *that* figure were suitable for inclusion in a game of this type, that’s still about 140,000 possible songs.
As you mention, there are about 58 songs in Rock Band and 71 in Guitar Hero 3. So what are the odds that if you selected 2 sets of songs (one group of 58, and one of 71) from a library of 140,000 possible songs, you’d end up with 6 songs in common? Pretty damn small. And adjusting the number from 140,000 to even half that figure doesn’t make it appreciably likelier. This is accentuated even more when you consider that the songs aren’t necessarily the usual suspects - Mountain isn’t exactly an artist that most people would immediately peg for inclusion.. and although Smashing Pumpkins seems like an obvious choice, there are other SP options besides Cherub Rock.
So no, I’m not complaining. But I do think it’s highly suggestive of something else going on - perhaps some serious competition between Harmonix and Neversoft?
November 19th, 2007 at 5:45 am
I’ll grant that there is probably some degree of direct competition here (although I wouldn’t necessarily call it “plagiarism”), but I still have a few counters for this:
1) With these games every song needs to be licensed individually from the artist or whoever owns the rights to the song now. As they were already licensed for one music game, it was probably easy enough for the owners to license the same songs for another game in the same style. It may not seem like it’d be a big deal for an artist to license a different song of theirs, but I know that it is done on a song by song basis, and it might simply be easier to license the same song.
2) Do you really believe the spectrum of “suitable” songs is in the realm of 140k? I think it’s substantially less… maybe in the realm of 1000-2000 songs or even less than that. There are only so many songs that are either popular enough today or “classic” enough from the last 50 years that they make good candidates for a game like this, at least in terms of the “main” tracks. I think both of the games have somewhere around 45 “classic” or “popular” songs, from which these 6 overlap, and then the rest are mostly indie artists that they just want to highlight, which there is obviously a much bigger list to choose from.
Let’s put it this way… there’s a reason why when you listen to the radio you hear the same songs over and over again… they’re either “classics” or they’re newly “popular” (top 40ish), and these are the songs that GH and Rock Band are essentially choosing from.
3) I don’t know that these songs you’re talking about are THAT obscure. The Strokes and Killers fall into the currently “popular” category, Beastie Boys and Smashing Pumpkins (including “Cherub Rock”) fall probably into a sort of modern “classics” category, Black Sabbath is a requisite “metal” song (and, though I’m no expert, that’s probably one of the more popular ones), and Mountain is “classic” 70’s rock, even if a bit more obscure (but I’ve still heard that song come up on classic rock radio as well, I’m fairly certain.)
November 19th, 2007 at 5:51 pm
This is a bit of an echo chamber, but a few more thoughts:
2.) Say it is only 1,000 songs. 6 out of a thousand is still a pretty small number. But I’d say it’s probably higher than that anyways.
3.) The artists are definitely well-known, but not necessarily the tracks themselves. To pick the *same* Beastie Boys or Pumpkins song is what strikes me as odd.
There may be something to your first point - licensing en masse may just be easier.