For several years, Harmonix had essentially all it’s time invested in developing Guitar Hero, and ultimately Rock Band. When things were good, it was great. But once the genre started slowing down (to put it gently), Harmonix had to refocus on other things besides just Rock Band. Dance Central appears to be the must-have game for Microsoft’s new Kinect hardware, and newly announced VidRhythm will feature Harmonix’s first dedicated effort for the iOS platform. But what about Rock Band? WHAT ABOUT US?!

Harmonix CEO and co-founder Alex Rigopulos recently chatted with gaming industry news site Gamasutra about the “reinvention” of Harmonix. While much was discussed about the other two intellectual properties listed above, a few solid questions were raised about the current state of the Rock Band franchise. When asked about the creative change from being owned by Viacom, Rigopulos mentioned this:

“I should mention that we do continue to support the Rock Band business, which is actually now quite a profitable business for us in terms of the downloadable content, and we have fairly ambitious plans on where we want to take the Rock Band franchise in the future in what I think will be some big, unexpected directions.”

While we could speculate all day on what those “big, unexpected directions” could be, we really have no idea. Based on another comment Rigopulos made, we can take assurance that DLC won’t be going anywhere for awhile.

“[DLC is] a meaningful source of profitability for us. There’s still a dedicated core of Rock Band fans that come in week after week to buy new releases of this content. So it’s an important source of business that we will continue to foster for quite some time, independent of the more substantial reworkings of the Rock Band franchise that we have in mind.”

I HIGHLY recommend checking out the rest of the interview. Since we only cover Rock Band here on the site, Rigopulos makes numerous mentions to multiple new iOS IPs, as well as leaves the door open to a revisit of the Amplitude/Frequency franchises.

[Gamasutra via @Delibird444]