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.
