Last year’s Rock Band 3 is getting a second chance thanks to peripheral manufacturer Mad Catz, who today announced three new bundles for the most current iteration of Harmonix’s flagship rhythm game. The first bundle packages the game with the Fender Mustang Pro Guitar (the more “realistic” axe that features over 100 buttons to simulate real frets and strings,) for $150 dollars, while the second and third bundles give you the standard six button controller or its bass guitar variant for the much more affordable prices of $70 and $80, respectively.
Rock Band 3 originally came out during the last holiday season, and despite receiving mostly positive reviews, sold extremely poorly, inspiring to the then-publishers of the franchise, EA and MTV Games, to sell off their stake in the franchise to Mad Catz. Despite the game’s poor sales, Harmonix CEO Alex Rigopulos maintains that the game remains profitable thanks to the game’s small but dedicated community, who buy enough DLC songs and albums to keep the franchise afloat.
It’s no secret that the rhythm genre is pretty dead; years of iterative releases and a flood of Guitar Hero clones and sequels quickly killed the genre’s popularity, and Guitar Hero publisher Activision has more or less given up on the genre all together. Still, despite the public’s new found apathy regarding music games, Rock Band 3 is still a worthwhile product in it’s own right, and here’s hoping that the game finds more success with it’s new publisher than it has in previous years.
