Calling It: Song creation in "music" games will be useless and lousy.

[GilloD]

Five people will make a shitload of bad covers, everyone else will play with it for about 10 minutes and never look at it again. Songs, especially covers, will be unsharable. The interface will be wildly unwieldy.

So sayeth I, the great predictor of Rock Band 2's "Feel the Pain".

[Howard Alan Treesong]

I predicted this ages ago, and I encourage my industry journo friends to call Activision on it.

- If they enforce IP, the created songs won't be anything anyone wants to play.
- If they don't enforce IP, the created songs will be the greatest copyright infringement bonanza this side of YouTube.
- In either case, the songs will be shitty MIDI with no vocals.

[GilloD]

I predicted this ages ago, and I encourage my industry journo friends to call Activision on it.

- If they enforce IP, the created songs won't be anything anyone wants to play.
- If they don't enforce IP, the created songs will be the greatest copyright infringement bonanza this side of YouTube.
- In either case, the songs will be shitty MIDI with no vocals.

Then let us join hands and begin the prophecy.

[Mr. Gundam]

Yeah, this won't end well. But, what that said, my group of friends have a few songs (Do the Rape Box, and Eagle Song) that we'd love to incorporate instruments into and fuck around with for fun.

[BobFromPikeCreek]

It's just a bullet point for the case. From what I've seen it doesn't look very fun.

[TVC15]

How can you call something that's obvious?  Anyone with a portion of a brain could safely figure this feature would suck major ass in at least one way or another.

[Howard Alan Treesong]

What I'd like to see Harmonix do - and their current lack of commitment to the feature makes me think they're heading in this direction - is release a suite of PC tools for actual robust content creation, rather than half-ass it in the game client.

[MyNameIsMethodis]

It was bad in MTV Music Generator, what makes people think it'll be any different now?

The only games with good song creations were Amplitude + Frequency, Harmonix' first games.

[Eel O'Brian]

i probably won't even touch it, i just want to do my impression of diamond dave

[Eel O'Brian]

this is what every created song will be like

[The Sceneman]

How can you call something that's obvious?  Anyone with a portion of a brain could safely figure this feature would suck major ass in at least one way or another.

exactly what I was thinking when I read the thread title 

[Joe Molotov]

I called this as soon as they said you couldn't have vocals.

[pilonv1]

this is what every created song will be like

(Image removed from quote.)

I would play that song

[disgruntled_jojo]

I completely agree with the OP, and so do most of my friends.  That's why I don't see it as a selling point.  Although we generally agree a few things will happen:

1) They will go the youtube route on IP infringement.  I.E. 'if we get an infringement claim, we'll take it down'.  The users will then immediately put it back up, just like youtube.
2) 90% of all created songs will be homemade covers of published music.  
3) Of the remaining 10%, 5% will be disharmonious garbage, 4% will be 'come play my song its even harder than dragonforce kekeke' and 1% will actually turn out to be pretty decent.  No one will be willing to wade through the other 99% to find it.  Trying to implement user ratings and the like will just mean that the covers of songs people want but that licensing isn't available for will drown out anything original that's actually good.
4) Profit?? seems doubtful

[abrader]

bu bu bu mario paint!

[TVC15]

I completely agree with the OP, and so do most of my friends.  That's why I don't see it as a selling point.  Although we generally agree a few things will happen:

1) They will go the youtube route on IP infringement.  I.E. 'if we get an infringement claim, we'll take it down'.  The users will then immediately put it back up, just like youtube.
2) 90% of all created songs will be homemade covers of published music.  
3) Of the remaining 10%, 5% will be disharmonious garbage, 4% will be 'come play my song its even harder than dragonforce kekeke' and 1% will actually turn out to be pretty decent.  No one will be willing to wade through the other 99% to find it.  Trying to implement user ratings and the like will just mean that the covers of songs people want but that licensing isn't available for will drown out anything original that's actually good.
4) Profit?? seems doubtful

5) As evidenced by the above, this feature would be near useless even if it were awesome.  Nobody wants to hear the original music made by some schmoe with a video game, and Activision won't be interested in letting people do copyright infringement.  Lose-lose.

[MyNameIsMethodis]

Thats actually one of the problems Amplitude and Frequency had; everyone was trying to make the "Hardest song in the game" remixes.

[cool breeze]

They should let you remix the existing songs instead.  Include an expansion pack bundled with a turntable controller.  That would be cool.  It could be like Girl Talk, except heterosexual.