After playing a few weeks of Guitar Hero 3 I can definitely say I’m a fan of the series. I’ve managed to play through easy and get halfway through medium difficulty at this point. After playing easy for awhile a problem became apparent to me that probably has been faced by pretty much everyone who’s played the series. I want more songs. The box for the game advertises there are over 70 songs, but that stretches the truth a bit. In the main game there are 42 songs plus one unlocked after completing career mode. You can play the co-op career more and open up an additional 7 songs. Then you can buy a whole whack more songs from the in-game store, but when you go through the whole list there are about 5 bands most people have heard of, then the rest is filler. So by my reckoning there are about 53 worthwhile songs to play when it’s all said and done. And since not everyones taste in music is the same there are only a certain percentage of songs that gamers are going to want to revisit on a regular basis. There are plenty of songs I’ve just kinda left without perfecting on easy just because they don’t float my boat. So I can count my song tally as well below 53 songs. Since I have the Wii version of the game there isn’t any downloadable content available yet, so what I’ve got now is pretty much it for songs at the moment. The Xbox 360 and PS3 do have a some downloadable content, but even it isn’t a large volume of fresh songs to play, especially when compared to rival game Rock Band(which has 47 downloadable tracks, including a new Oasis song pack being released tomorrow).

Since I’ve only started playing the series I can understand the plight of experienced users playing the game who can easily breeze through the entire songlist. They can breeze through the game even quicker then I can. This whole situation got me thinking. I think the next Guitar Hero needs to be less about new songs and more about creating a conduit for getting fresh music to users. This is a game that I don’t suspect too many users are sitting there complaining about the graphics. It’s all about enjoying the music.

To me it seems like Activision is going about this whole thing the wrong way. Instead of spooging out new games once or twice a year, they should focus on creating a game that acts as a sustainable content delivery system. Enable users to get as much music as they desire. The music industry has complained and litigated for years trying to stamp out music piracy, yet here are games (Guitar Hero and Rock Band), that people are falling all over themselves to get their hands on more music to play[ ]. And it’s the kind of music that the music industry loves too. The record labels love selling you old music you’ve bought repeatedly before in new formats. If the next versions of these games opted to sell the game for a drastically reduced price and instead made their profits on the peripherals and let people spend their money on the playlists of their dreams I think these companies would be making a lot more then the $60 a pop a video game costs at retail.

I know personally I would gladly buy more songs if they were available to me. Now it’s just up to the video game makers and the music industry to get their act together and start delivering. I’m not talking a couple of songs. I want an iTunes Store library of songs available to me. And this is something that doesn’t need to just apply to rock based games. There should be games of all different genres with downloadable tracks for everything. This whole music and video gaming concept isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. People will still buy music, it’s just a matter of delivering it to them how they want it.