After supporting the game with DLC song drops for over eight years, Harmonix has announced that they will cease making new DLC for Rock Band 4 on January 25th, 2023. The decision puts a close to Harmonix's last game title to sport plastic instruments and also ends their program of releasing weekly DLC songs for supported rhythm games under their label since 2007, a 16 year-old tradition. This program allowed Rock Band users to suggest missing songs for inclusion in the series and when considering backwards compatibility, added nearly 3,000 songs to the series.

In a blog post announcing the decision, Harmonix's Daniel Sussman affirmed that Rock Band 4's online servers, services, Rivals seasons, and online-modes would remain unaffected. Sussman then goes on to share that Harmonix is continuing to work on the Fortnite Festival feature, which Harmonix continues to tease will eventually support Rock band plastic instruments.

Looking ahead, the Harmonix team has been hard at work over the last two years to develop Fortnite Festival, which brings rhythm action gaming (and more) to the Fortnite ecosystem. It’s free to play, we have a rotating selection of songs that you can play (for free) anytime. If you are a fan of the rhythm game category, Fortnite Festival is the place to be; and with support for RB4 instruments coming, this is not the time to hang up your guitars just yet….

It's definitely a bummer seeing Harmonix get stuck working on a special mode in Fortnite, but after Fuser completely tanked and Harmonix's app-board game hybrid DropMix struggled to remain profitable after an initial wave of hype, it is a preferable fate than being completely shuttered. Also, with the rise of Clone Hero, Rock Band and Guitar Hero's mantle is rapidly being take up by the homebrew community.

Nonetheless, eight years of dedicated support is absolutely phenomenal stuff and I have it on good authority that Rock Band 4 Rivals competitive play is still a lot of fun with an incredibly active and dedicated online community.

I don't know that I agree that working on a special mode in Fortnite is such a bad fate, especially when that mode is going to support the plastic instruments. It's available on every platform, and even though it's kind of a sub mode within a game it has a massive audience and an opportunity for Harmonix to rebuild its core game design in a sustainable format, with the Fortnite concerts and that kind of thing.

Do they lose some degree of creative control and ability to impose their own personality on what they're making? Absolutely. But having played a bunch of Harmonix stuff in the past I think that Fortnite's aesthetic actually matches up pretty well with what they do. Fuser has big Fortnite energy and even the Rockband games (except for maybe the band specific ones) had a broad goofy energy to them.

I guess I just feel like games are changing and of the changes we've seen franchises and studios go through this seems like one of the best possible outcomes for a studio working in a format that isn't commercially viable anymore.

This is not Vicarious Visions being disbanded to be absorbed into Blizzard and do support on various live service Blizzard games. It's more like if instead they decided to make a Blizzard themed extreme sports game and asked the team that made the Tony Hawk remakes to do it. Would they rather make another Tony Hawk remake or, probably better, their own Tony Hawk game? Probably. But it's still the same kind of work and they still get some degree of creative freedom within that constraint.

And yes they may be trapped doing this forever but they did Rockband for close to 20 years so I'm not sure that's so different, and they may be able to make smaller side projects from time to time too.

@bigsocrates: The big thing is that Festival just kinda feels... off compared to Rock Band and the pricing for the songs is much higher than it is for RB ($2 compared to iirc $6)

As a big fan of Fuser, I'm glad there's some hope of something similar in the future. The Jam Stage is pretty fun already now that a few more songs have been added. Festival's the only reason I play Fortnite now, after putting about 200 hours into it last year.

Happy for the fans. Better late than never.

I also wanted to play those games, but don't have the space for all of those instruments. Maybe some day.

It's a bummer but I think we all saw this coming eventually. I do hope those new instruments they put out end up being Rock Band compatible. I'd buy Rock Band 4 in a heartbeat if they do.

I think the more frustrating thing about all this is that everyone who played Fuser was like "this idea rules" but nobody played it so it tanked. They literally took the song pitch-shift/speed change and remixing stuff from Fuser and duct taped it into Fortnite in the form of those band get-together thingies and now that prints money. I guess you could say they failed at marketing Fuser but still it's always frustrating to see people ignore cool things unless it's shoved in their faces and they're forced to pay attention to it so they can see why it's good.

But yeah, if you want to play a Rock Band-like, now it's easier than ever. Clone Hero is literally plug and play if you have Rock Band instruments. If you want to play Rock Band but only have Rock Band 1 instruments that don't work with Rock Band 4 and don't have a functioning 360 or PS3 anymore, you can play Rock Band 3 on a PS3 emulator and it works with Xbox or PS3 instruments. The added bonus now is if you have a newer monitor with a fast refresh and response time, you don't have to worry about sync. I have a 240hz Dell monitor and it feels almost as responsive as playing on a CRT. I didn't have to do any calibration to play guitar or drums using it. It's like playing on a plasma TV back in the day.