This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Daniel Sussman: We're here talking about Rock Band 4.

Ross Miller: Surprise, surprise.

The rumors are true... We've had a team working on this for a couple months, it really started in earnest over the summer, trying to answer the question, "Why now, why are we doing this?" and out of a certain respect that we have for the brand and for the franchise, we felt it was really important not to just port Rock Band 3 but to do something that would be compelling and interesting for us as developers, as creative people. And also for our community and to really approach a Rock Band 4 as an opportunity to innovate in this space. I don't think this is a genre that has seen a tremendous amount of gameplay innovation as it relates to the core game; a lot of the innovations were in adding instruments and adding game modes and adding things that sat next to the core, but the core has been pretty static for a long time.

That to me is a problem, and it's a thing that we've put a lot of thought into. So first thing we did was play a lot of Rock Band. And these are people that have played a lot of Rock Band and worked on a lot of Rock Band [games], and there was this amazing thing that happened as we dipped into the back catalog and went, "Shit, this game is really fun!" It was a really powerful, emotional thing, to be able to come back to something, we hadn't worked on it, we hadn't thought about it, and a lot of us hadn't really played it for a good amount of time.

"We thought that DLC would be a really interesting way to poke the sleeping bear."

Is that why those recent DLC packs just kind of showed up? Were you testing the waters?

Well, no. That was deliberate, and I'll get into this, but what we're really interested in this time around is improving the quality of our dialogue with our community such that we can react to things that they want. And we thought that releasing DLC would be a really interesting way to poke the sleeping bear a little bit and get people thinking about Rock Band and asking the question, "What does this mean?" The response was exactly what we hoped for. It did exactly that, and there was a lot of speculation: "Why are they doing this now?" and "What's up with the song titles?" and "Are they doing this on purpose? What is this?" We were able to sit back here and go, "Yes, we were. We were doing it on purpose." But the really phenomenal thing about it was that it sent a message to us that, hey, there are people that are psyched.

This is not a game that we want to jam down anyone's throat; we want to make sure that there is a receptive audience, that people are excited to come back to this thing and to see what we're doing. The response that we've gotten to the DLC, to the questionnaire that we put out a few weeks ago, has been overwhelmingly positive, and to that end, I think that we do have a handle on some of the issues that people have, in respect to things that they care deeply about, in terms of what Rock Band 4 needs to do and also some thoughts about the rise and fall of the band game genre.

Let's talk about the survey. What were some of the highlights and lowlights of the responses?

A few things. One thing that jumped out to me, which I'd sort of forgotten about, was the degree to which Rock Band serves as a vehicle for people to learn about new music, and I sort of had forgotten. I think about Rock Band, and I think about these parties where everybody's sort of singing "Livin' on a Prayer.' It's really important for people to have access to songs that they know and don't know. And that was a thing that came out on the survey just in terms of, "What do you think is important about Rock Band, and what are the things you like?"

This is all related, though, because we're sort of peering back through the lens of history to try to figure out like, where's the opportunity here, and why are we doing this? What are we psyched about? As we've started talking to our fans what we've found is that there are a couple of very fundamental things that people care a lot about that are not necessarily these flashy new features that we're all excited about, but there are things like "What about my DLC library? What about the hardware that I have in my house?" So I want to talk about those two things because they matter.

On the DLC front, we are working very hard to port all of the songs that we have had in our library forward to the Xbox One and PS4, and that's a time-intensive process. We're actually taking a library that took us five-plus years to accumulate, and we're doing all of that work in a very compressed window in a matter of months.

"What about my DLC library? What about the hardware that I have in my house?"

How many songs is that?

It's over 2,000. It's a big number. So it's our hope that players have access to the full catalog of music that has already been licensed to this game. Only a very small percentage actually own everything... but there are a lot of people that have bought lots of songs already, and to those folks, we want to make sure your library of songs on the PS3 will carry forward to the PS4 and same on the Xbox 360 to the Xbox One.

Not cross platform?

Not cross platform. I wouldn't put the stake through that, but that's the one that would take a lot of support from Microsoft and Sony, and frankly that's a political rat's nest. I don't see it. And we have our hands full just getting everything up first. So building a library is kind of the first step and respecting the entitlements that people have.