According to this article I read the other day, Guitar Hero World Tour and Rock Band 2 failed to meet industry sales expectations in 2008. Their sales were lower than their respective franchise sales in 2007 despite have many more titles in the market, which was supposedly going to offset the negative impacts of the economy.

Having played both, I can't imagine that the low sales are due to lack of improvement on the first releases - the added drums and mic for Guitar Hero really make the game way more fun (honestly though multiplayer generally has that effect) as I've spent many hours playing happily with other writers of this blog and our friends. The song selection is larger, the customizable avatars the icing on the cake.

But, despite immediately buying Guitar Hero when it came out for Wii, I've opted to wait on buying either the new Rock Band or Guitar Hero. And I'm sure I'm not the only one - there was nothing wrong with my older copies, I've yet to beat all of the songs on expert, and I don't envision myself sitting by myself playing just the drums or fumbling my way through the lyrics of many of the song options. I'd love to think it'll just take a little getting used to having my own one-person kareoke show but in reality I envision the extra equipment becoming my latest end table in my furniture-limited apartment.

(Luckily I don't aspire to be these guys...)

Declining economy or not, ultimately the latest music games (even Wii Music) all seem best suited to a multiplayer environment, possibly bringing down these new music titles' sales, and should have done a better job to equally engage the individual player to entice spending that extra $100.