Rock Band 4 ushered the famous music game franchise into the last generation way back in 2015 - and it still remains the latest core Rock Band release to this day. Now, after almost 10 years on the market, the development team has announced that its weekly DLC drops are coming to an end.
Following more than eight years of DLC support, Harmonix is winding down development on Rock Band 4. The team posted a message to its fans this week on the move, which you can read in full down below:
"After over 8 years of weekly Rock Band 4 DLC releases, we’re here to let you know that January 25 will be the last DLC release of the RB4 era. All other live services will continue as normal, including Rivals seasons, online play, and everything else.
Working in support of the Rock Band community has been a high point in my professional life - wading through the thousands of song requests we get, working through what songs to pursue and release, it’s all hard work but also really satisfying.
Taking a longer look back, I see the Rock Band DLC catalog as a huge achievement in persistence and commitment - over the years we’ve cleared, authored and released nearly 3,000 songs as DLC and well over 3,000 if you include all the game soundtracks. That’s wild. Many of you reading this own a good chunk of this content and we remain committed to protecting that investment - to be very clear, you can play the songs you own within Rock Band 4 for as long as you like.
Looking ahead, the Harmonix team has been hard at work over the last two years to develop Fortnite Festival, which brings rhythm action gaming (and more) to the Fortnite ecosystem. It’s free to play, we have a rotating selection of songs that you can play (for free) anytime. If you are a fan of the rhythm game category, Fortnite Festival is the place to be; and with support for RB4 instruments coming, this is not the time to hang up your guitars just yet….
We deliberated long and hard about how to frame the last blast of RB DLC of this era. The last two weeks will feature some tear jerkers that sum up our feelings about this moment. We thank you for your commitment to and passion for this wonderful game."
As you can see up at the top of that statement there, the game's final DLC pack will launch next week on January 25th, and the rest of the game's online services will continue to work for the foreseeable future.
Clearly, Harmonix is now putting more focus into its new Fortnite Festival spin-off, which went live recently under the wider Fortnite ecosystem. If this one manages to last as long as Rock Band 4, then fair play to the Harmonix team!