End of an Era: Rock Band DLC Comes to a Close After 8 Years and 3,000 Songs

17 Jan at 23:19

a woman rocks out on a black guitar in Rock Band 4 while a man sings in the background

Michael McWhertor
is a journalist with more than 17 years of experience covering video games, technology, movies, TV, and entertainment.

The final songs for Rock Band 4 will be released next week, ending an eight-year streak of weekly DLC releases for the rhythm game, developer Harmonix announced Wednesday. The studio’s future work will come to Fortnite Festival, the Rock Band-like game mode for Fortnite that launched in December.

Rock Band 4’s final DLC will arrive on Jan. 25, though Harmonix has not announced which tunes will close out the game’s run of nearly 3,000 post-launch songs. “We deliberated long and hard about how to frame the last blast of RB DLC of this era,” the developer said in an announcement on the Harmonix website. “The last two weeks will feature some tear jerkers that sum up our feelings about this moment.”

Harmonix says that all other live services for Rock Band 4 “will continue as normal, including Rivals seasons, [and] online play.” The studio also committed to ensuring that players will keep the songs they’ve purchased, adding, “to be very clear, you can play the songs you own within Rock Band 4 for as long as you like.”

For Rock Band fans looking for new content, “Fortnite Festival is the place to be,” Harmonix said. The Epic Games-owned developer released Fortnite Festival last month with two modes: Main Stage, which is a simplified Rock Band-like experience for up to four players; and Jam Stage, which is inspired by Harmonix’s song mashup game Fuser.

Fortnite Festival is free to play and has add-on music of its own, with a rotating selection of free songs. Harmonix has committed to bringing support for Rock Band 4 instruments to Fortnite Festival, which currently supports gamepad and keyboard controls, sometime this year.

Rock Band 4 launched with 65 songs. Harmonix brought that number to more than 120 with the release of the Rock Band Rivals expansion in 2016. Harmonix has since released new tracks for Rock Band 4 on a weekly cadence. In recent weeks, the developer has released DLC including Beastie Boys’ “So What’Cha Want,” Queens of the Stone Age’s “No One Knows,” and Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” through the Rock Band Music Store.

Source: Polygon