Rumorong: GameSpot says Rock Band 2 will support RB1 songs

DLC content will work on both RockBand 1 and RockBand 2.

RB1 songs that are on the disc may or may not be playable with the Rockband 2 disc inserted. Will find out during E3.

World Tour is mode in RockBand. That's where it should stay.

No, you're wrong.

RB1 DLC WILL work with RB2. The question is whether the songs that came on the RB1 disc will work with RB2.

The DLC works, just not the songs on your Rock Band 1 disc.

joke's on you guys, he's being sarcastic. he didn't buy any dlc, he bought the disc. so those are all the songs he paid for

Hey Mr. Grant. What's your opinion on the whole RB/GH imbroglio?

Love the site.


I'll stop sucking up now.

ahhh ok, thanks for the info... I wasnt reading it the same way I guess.

You can't imagine? I can...

Beat Endless setlist on expert (by all players) and you unlock the ability to download your disc to your drive. This (most likely) stops people from renting the game to get the DLC, well, except those who want to do multiple rentals (then you might as well buy it anyway). I mean, how much is RB1 going to cost anyway by the time RB2 comes out, sans old peripherals.

Or, How about a $5 XBL fee that puts the disc on your drive, and registers the Rock band 1 disc on XBL, allowing the "unlocking" a single time (so each rental copy would get one useage out of it before the disc is "used"). Who knows how/if this could work, but you never know how much thought Harmonix put into this before hand.

Or, what about a trade in program with Gamestop. When you trade in your old copy of RB1, you get a free upgrade to the "limited edition" of rock band 2, that includes a bonus disc of RB1 content. Gamestop gets to sell all the old rockband 1 discs, and you get a single usable disc.

Or, this limited edition could just cost like $80 without a trade-in.

I can see you really thought this through.

There's no way my wife and I are ever going to do the Endless Setlist on any difficulty level. We just don't have the time to commit to this. So that excludes me and anyone who isn't currently working a full time job from ever accessing our RB1 disc content. Thanks!

$5 gets spread pretty thin after EA takes their piece, MTV takes theirs, Harmonix maybe gets thrown a couple pennies per, and then each artist gets a fraction of a cent. Any more than $5 and people cry foul for having to pay for content they already bought at retail.

Do I need to address a Gamestop trade-in option? Really?

You're coming at this from the wrong side. If they're going to make this content downloadable to everyone who owns RB1, how do they restrict it for people who only buy RB2? If they're going to make it swappable-disc-based, does that mean RB1 songs are partitioned from RB2 songs completely?

How about RB2 extracts the songs from the RB1 disc to your hard drive? Well, that means the RB1 disc is useless and can be resold or traded. That means EA/MTV gets no cut. This is a business... getting on gamers' good side is one thing, especially when in direct competition with a strong competitor, but I can't see EA giving up potential income. I hope they prove me wrong, though.

I work fulltime and have done the endless setlist.

It's not about changing discs, it's about losing features when you decide to play RB1 again. This way everything will be a nice extensive package.

I agree. Who the hell would want to go 4-6 months without Rock Band 1 OR 2 just to get both on the same disc?

Ya and i dont have the cereal box-tops.

How hard is this?

Rock Band 2 comes with an download option that rips your Rock Band 1 tracks to the hard drive.

All the technical mumbo-jumbo about usage and blah blah blahs can be sorted out later.

Verrrrrry simple, and at an average of 40MB per song, should only take up about 2.4GB on the hard drive.

Sure, that limits those without the harddrive, but really, c'mon, who cares about those people anyway? ;-)

I'm sure the issue is more the licensing of the songs than any technical problem. It's hard to imagine in this world of rapidshare and torrents, but record labels do expect to get paid for each download of their tracks or EACH DISC their tracks appear on... that is called "mechanicals" and depending on their contracts with the labels/brokers of the songs, it may completely violate their contracts to make on on-disc songs available in a different format... because their ontract with the labels probably says "we will give you $0.20 per disc this song appears on" and doesnt mention the right to copy said song to a hard drive or memory card.

This is, I would assume avoided in the DLC songs, because they likely are paying the labels on a per-download basis, irregardless of which game is access the file.