Study: Rock Band, Guitar Hero Players Demonstrate Strong Music Genre Loyalty

Players of games in the Rock Band and Guitar Hero franchise demonstrate strong music game loyalty -- but contrary to what some might expect, they seem nearly as loyal to the genre overall as they do to just one franchise or the other, according to a new DFC Intelligence report. During the month of September, DFC and partner GamerDNA tracked 10,000 users of the Xbox 360 versions of Neversoft's Guitar Hero 5 and Harmonix's The Beatles: Rock Band, and found a high degree of overlap between those groups. For example, 45 percent of Guitar Hero 5 players also played The Beatles: Rock Band, while 34 percent of the latter's players played Guitar Hero 5. One reason for the lower second figure is The Beatles' particular ability to attract new gamers: 64 percent of The Beatles players had not played Rock Band 2 or Guitar Hero World Tour, the two franchises' previous full entries, while only 46 percent of Guitar Hero 5 users had not played either of those games. In general, broad loyalty to the music game genre seemed to win out over loyalty to specific brands. Nearly a quarter of Guitar Hero World Tour users went on to play Guitar Hero 5 less than a month after the new game was released, but almost as many -- 21 percent -- also played The Beatles: Rock Band. Roughly mirroring those figures, just over a quarter of Rock Band 2 players went on to play The Beatles: Rock Band in its opening month, and 19 percent of them played Guitar Hero 5. "This high cross play figure indicates significant interest in music games in general among a large portion of the user base," said DFC's Jeremy Miller of his firm's findings.