Harmonix launches Fig campaign for Rock Band 4 on PC
Upload and sell your own music via Steam Workshop.
Rock Band 4 developer Harmonix wants to bring its latest party game to PC, only it needs your money to bankroll it.
The Boston-based developer launched a Fig campaign where backers can pledge money for the game or even invest in its success and receive a cut of the revenue when it releases.
The major advantage of a PC version of Rock Band 4 will be that it will let players upload and sell their own songs over Steam Workshop. Harmonix premiered this concept several years back over the now defunct Rock Band Network, but the infrastructure costs were too high to maintain at the time.
"Rock Band Network was a set of tools that allowed you to take your own song audio, add MIDI information, and create song files playable by Rock Band 3, plus server infrastructure to upload those songs to Xbox Live and sell them in Rock Band 3," the developer explained. "RBN required a paid membership and a detailed Peer Review process, and the infrastructure took a lot of work on our end to keep up and running... a little too much it turned out, and we had to close it down in 2014 [*sniff!*]"
"But with a PC version being released on Steam much of the infrastructure for adding songs to the game can be done via Steam Workshop, with no fees and less overhead. So we're updating the authoring tools and documentation to help anyone with a song in their heart (and multi-track audio recordings, and some time....) to create playable Rock Band songs."
"Then, using Steam Workshop, you can submit those files to us - we'll do a quick check to make sure they play properly and include music you own, and then put them into the game via the Rock Band 4 in-game store. Steam Workshop makes sure you get your cut of the revenues when they sell."
Beyond that, this PC port of Rock Band 4 will contain all the content of the current console versions with 65 songs packed in, plus more than 1700 available as DLC. The PC version will also be updated alongside the console editions.
You can reserve Rock Band 4 for PC by pledging $49 (about £35) and Harmonix will throw in an additional 30 songs and its rhythm arcade shmup A City Sleeps.
Harmonix needs to raise $1.5m by 5th April to fund Rock Band 4 on PC. After a few hours it's already raised $116,873.