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Harmonix Music Systems Chief Creative Officer and co-founder Alex Rigopulos is in a good mood when he answers my phone call. And despite the unseasonably terrible winter he’s stuck in the middle of in his studio’s Boston suburb of Cambridge, he has every reason to be jovial – it’s just over a week before Rigopulos and his team will unveil Rock Band 4

“ We needed a break from the franchise.

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“ This is the big bet that the studio is placing.

A pre-order exclusive red Rock Band 4 guitar.

“ The budget that we’ve allocated for the title supports a top-tier soundtrack.

Pre-order-exclusive red Rock Band 4 drums.

“ We haven’t made a specific plan with respect to release cadence of DLC yet.

White Rock Band 4 guitar.

“ Rocksmith is serving the audience that wants actual guitar instrumental instruction very well.

White Rock Band 4 drums.

“ When a huge market appears overnight, it can disappear just as quickly.

It was also, he adds, the right time for Harmonix creatively. “When we stopped developing Rock Band 3, clearly the market needed a break. [And] we wanted to wait until a clear and compelling creative vision for the next Rock Band title coalesced. We needed a break from the franchise.”Everything I’d been hearing about the Rock Band reunion tour suggested it was going to be a much leaner, more agile affair, development-wise, with Harmonix set to publish the game themselves and hardware partner MadCatz assisting on distribution.So is the team smaller? The budget? “It’s a substantial undertaking for a studio our size,” he tells me. “It’s probably not as big a production as Beatles Rock Band. [But] this is the big bet that the studio is placing.”I ask if it’s a big enough bet where we can expect big-name artists to fill out the game’s soundtrack. “The budget that we’ve allocated for the title supports a top-tier soundtrack,” he assures me, noting that the song-selection strategy for Rock Band 4 is “one aspect of the experience that we’re not aiming to change.”And then a serious answer: “To the degree that people have channels of communication directly with Sony and Microsoft to politely express their views as a community, obviously we would welcome that support. But both have been very supportive and have been working with us on technology and policy issues that make this difficult. It is a challenge but it’s something that they’re working actively with us on. I am confident that we’ll be able to find workable solutions.”How about DLC? Can we still expect weekly song drops?“In terms of pricing, [raising is] possible,” he answers when I ask him if we should expect song prices to increase. “My guess is that we’ll be doing a number of pricing experiments to see what works for the audience, and what’s sustainable,” adding that in some cases song prices might actually go down.Why, I ask, are they dropping the learn-to-play-real-guitar Pro Mode stuff they introduced in Rock Band 3? Does Harmonix think Ubisoft San Francisco’s Rocksmith has got that niche sufficiently covered? “Yes,” Rigopulos answers candidly. “Rocksmith is serving the audience that wants actual guitar instrumental instruction very well. I also think that in retrospect, Rock Band had become very sprawling. It was trying to be everything to everyone in a way that was somewhat defocusing. Philosophically in Rock Band 4, we’re trying to go back to the core of what made Rock Band Rock Band and just go much deeper on that as opposed to adding all this extra functionality around the edges.“Rock Band 4-ever,” he retorts with a laugh. And then, more seriously, “I think that we wanted to make a clear statement that it’s the next evolution of the franchise. That said, unlike in the past, I think we’re clearly moving away from an annual title update strategy for the franchise. It was taxing on us. It was taxing on consumers. It put certain kinds of limits on the types of evolution that we could apply to the franchise when we had those annual cadences to meet.“Going forward, our goal is to view it as more of a live service where we can gradually and incrementally append new functionality to the core experience rather than having $60 annual title updates. My point is, you shouldn’t expect a Rock Band 5 in 2016.”“This time around we’re really focusing on serving a smaller, dedicated core of Rock Band enthusiasts and hoping to create a sustainable business that way, rather than trying to create the crazy rollercoaster ride that we were on last time around.”

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s Executive Editor of Previews and Xbox Guru-in-Chief. Follow him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan , catch him on Podcast Unlocked , and drop-ship him Taylor Ham sandwiches from New Jersey whenever possible.