Acclaim resets the music game business with Rockfree
“But most interestingly, the chief executive of Acclaim has just reinvented the music game genre’s business model. At the Casual Connect show in Hamburg, he gave me the scoop on Rockfree, something that can change the fast-growing music game business.Music games le Rock Band –- which just shipped it’s 10-millionth copy -– have been successful, and sometimes contentious with the music industry, who feel they’re not profiting as they should be.
Typically, a game like Guitar Hero will come with a large set of licensed songs and pre-made levels. Activision Blizzard pays the music industry a flat fee of $20,000 per song. And then it hopes to sell enough copies to cover the costs. But Acclaim has a massively multiplayer online game that flips the model on its head.
Rockfree is a browser-based, flash-powered game that closely copies the mechanics of games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero. Users can upload any song they want, and play with up to eight friends.
When it launches in a few weeks, the game will be free to play. Users are given three slots to put songs in. If they want more songs, they can add slots, for just $0.99 per month.
Any song can be swapped out for a different one. The average revenue per user for people that choose to pay will be $14 a month, Marks tells me.
The revolutionary part is that he isn’t paying licensing fees: instead, he’s paying 20 percent of the revenues from a micro-transaction to the song’s master holder and the publisher: an even split.”
