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Guitar Hero's Michael Sportouch

The franchise boss talks innovation in the music game genre, plus what constitutes value for money

GamesIndustry.biz There's been some controversy around the price points of some peripherals for music games, particularly when they're translated to European prices - how do you decide those, and how the perception of the US Dollar price works?
Michael Sportouch

We don't work in US Dollar equivalents - I don't want to go into the details, but there are many reasons for that. Our P&L (profit and loss) is not always aligned with what the US is doing - even though there is communication, it's a decision that's made here.

On the question of price, we do a lot of research on Guitar Hero - we've sold 35 million games and we have a very active fanbase. With Guitar Hero: World Tour's music studio we've had 250,000 created songs uploaded to our servers, which subsequently generated 17 million downloads.

So we have active communication with our fanbase and consumers. What's the motivation behind buying Guitar Hero? Firstly it's the music selection, and secondly that it's an easy, social and fun gameplay experience.

When we think about the pricing of our products it's about value for money for the consumer - we think today we didn't have a negative reaction from the consumer on our price, and our value for money.

So it's not just about what the consumer price is, it's about what represents value for money - how many hours of entertainment are we delivering? And so far our audience has reacted very well.

If you take Band Hero, with the microphone, drums, guitar and the disc, yes - there is a price to pay. But the number of hours of fun and entertainment... we think - and not only us, but our consumers thing - it's great value for money.

If I take GH5, and I don't want to compare with some other releases that we have in front of us, but we're presenting the largest variety of music ever, with 85 tracks from 83 different artists. It's good value for money.

If I take DJ Hero we've got 90 unique mixes that you'll never find elsewhere, but they're coming from different artists that are exclusive to DJ Hero - so even if you were buying the song individually on iTunes, for example, even without the peripheral it would cost you USD 90, or Euro equivalent.

When you add the peripheral to that, we're delivering an interactive experience. It's not only about listening to the music, you play with it - you create with it. We feel that we're giving the right value for money, but please be sure that we're always challenging ourselves on whether it's the right pricing, the right value for money, and are we delivering enough content?

All the research that we've done for DJ Hero... when we presented the turntable, people were impressed. It's not just like a piece of plastic - it looks really high quality, like a professional turntable.

And when we told them what the price would be with the disc, some people said they were happy to pay that amount of money.

But we'll always be extremely careful on the value for money.

Michael Sportouch is the head of the Guitar Hero franchise at Activision. Interview by Phil Elliott.

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