Will Ubisoft's Rocksmith be a Success or a Failure?

It's been a few years since Guitar Hero and Rock Band were at the height of the popularity and the music genre of video games is slowly losing its momentum but there is still one video game company that is hoping the genre isn't over just yet. Ubisoft is planning on extending the life of the music video game genre with Rocksmith.

Rocksmith will be coming to the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC later in 2011. Ubisoft plans to revolutionize the genre with an upgraded Guitar Hero. Instead of a guitar-shaped controller that will allow users to press buttons to play the game, Rocksmith instead will simply have a jack that will allow the user to plug into a real electric guitar.

Rocksmith sounds like an impressive game. The technology is impressive, there are some features that sound enjoyable-like the game automatically changing the gameplay based on the user's skill level-and there is a nice library that includes The Animals, The Black Keys, Nirvana, Rolling Stones, Interpol and David Bowie. Unfortunately there is one question that must be answered: will anybody play it?

Even though Rocksmith sounds fascinating there are three reasons that it could turn out to be a failure. The first reason is that Ubisoft simply might have missed their opportunity. As stated in the first paragraph the music genre just isn't at the height of its popularity anymore. Maybe the genre isn't completely dead, maybe Rocksmith will even rejuvenate the genre a little bit, but Rocksmith would have been a bigger hit when Guitar Hero and Rock Band were still big hits.

One of the biggest problems with Guitar Hero and Rock Band was the price. In addition to buying the game users also had to buy the instrument controllers. I'm no expert on musical instruments but I am guessing that an actual electric guitar-at least one nice enough worth owning-is more expensive than a controller. How many users will be willing to buy an electric guitar just to play a video game?

So if we rule out the video game users that don't already have an electric guitar then that just leaves users that have electric guitars. Will they want to buy Rocksmith? Why would they want to buy a video game to play a Rolling Stones or David Bowie song when they can just look up how to play the song themselves on the internet?

Rocksmith sounds like an intriguing and fun video game but unfortunately I believe Ubisoft is going to be disappointed with sales due to the music genre cooling and there not being much of an audience for Rocksmith.