Music genre in danger of over saturation, warns iNiS

Elite Beat Agents developer Keiichi Yano has warned that a glut of titles in the music genre could lead to over saturation and poor quality.

As titles such as Activision's Guitar Hero and Sony's SingStar strike a chord with the gaming audience, the designer and co-founder of iNiS said that he expects the genre to continue to grow, but hopes it won't be at the cost of good quality titles.

"With regards to the US — as well as Europe, actually — music games will probably continue to be very big and will probably outgrow their current market status right now," said Yano, in an interview with Gamasutra.

"Everybody's really looking forward to titles like Rock Band, and SingStar for PlayStation 3, and there are other titles in the works I'm sure that are probably fairly massive compared to what's been available for music games up until now," he commented.

Yano believes that it's not just understanding game development, but understanding music, that's key to creating quality titles in the music genre.

"I'm very concerned about the quality of the music games that are coming out and will come out, because again, I do feel as though it's kind of a special genre that requires specific knowledge of music and what makes music fun," he said.

"Hopefully, the games that come out that are in that genre can take advantage of all that and do those things right, and make sure that it's a really fun experience so that the genre itself can stay strong and not have a lot of bad clutter in it."