When Harmonix's Dance Central launches alongside Microsoft's Kinect hardware this November, expect to see a Rock Band-style music store where you'll be able to download additional tunes and moves for the game. You should also expect those additional routines to cost more than a five-instrument Rock Band track. In an interview with Joystiq, Dance Central Project Lead Kasson Crooker revealed that DLC for Dance Central will cost more than $2, the current going rate for individual Rock Band tracks.
== TEASER ==According to Crooker, the increased DLC price is not simply Harmonix trying to goose consumers for extra cash, but rather the result of the increased cost and challenge of generating additional Dance Central content. Crooker explains:
While I imagine it's easy to read a story about a developer increasing the cost of their DLC and subsequently freak out about the price, Crooker's point doesn't sound like a cause for consumer alarm to me. After all, I can't imagine how costly it must be to generate brand new animation in a very short period of time, let alone hire and mo-cap a choreographer."Because [Dance Central DLC] comes with a brand new unique routine with the three difficulties, we have to: engage the choreographer, find the song, license the song, come up with a routine, get them into a [motion capture] suit, shoot all the choreography, integrate the animation, build the filter system, the flash cards, the [voiceover] for 'Break it Down' -- it's a pretty elaborate process that is not only a lot more expensive, but a lot more time consuming."
Also, Dance Central DLC may be able to justify its higher price if it addresses the problem that Rock Band wasn't able to overcome; that the gameplay in the series has remained unchanged. No matter what DLC goes into Rock Band, you're still strumming notes as they come down the note lane. But if each new Dance Central track comes with brand new dance routines to master, that has the potential to make each new piece of DLC wildly different from each other. The new gameplay in each track might make DLC a more compelling purchase than Rock Band DLC, simply because you'll probably play each new track differently. We'll see how it all plays out when Dance Central launches on November 4.