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Battle of the bands: Guitar Hero 5 beats The Beatles: Rock Band
This week's charts see Guitar Hero emerge triumphant, with a terrific result for Colin McRae, too.
Written by Chris Schilling, 14 September 2009
Given EA's handling of the Rock Band brand in the UK - not to mention the sterling promotional efforts of Courtney Love - it's perhaps not all that surprising that Guitar Hero 5 outsold counterpart The Beatles: Rock Band to become this week's most popular game in the UK.
Rock Band has failed to match its phenomenal US success across Europe, partly down to the relatively limited market penetration of the original game. This factor undoubtedly harmed sales of the Fab Four's digital celebration, with many punters evidently plumping for Guitar Hero 5's solus edition for use with their existing instruments. This despite the huge marketing push and blanket media coverage afforded Harmonix's game, which was admittedly countered by the furore generated by Kurt Cobain's treatment in Neversoft's rival - Ms. Love's rants at publisher Activision proving that no publicity is bad publicity.
P3Zine Issue 44
For our latest Guitar Hero coverage, click here to download P3Zine Issue 44 for free.The 360 SKU of Guitar Hero 5 won out, clearly outselling its rivals on PS3 and Wii, while the 360 version of The Beatles: Rock Band was also the most popular, with the Wii version outselling the PS3 SKU. However, in the Individual Units chart, it was Colin McRae: DiRT 2 which was the biggest-seller of the week. 360-centric advertising perhaps helped the 360 versions of two of these three games comfortably outsell the PS3 counterparts, though Guitar Hero 5's marketing was completely format agnostic.
EA will be hoping positive word-of-mouth and the promise of the Fab Four's albums to be released as DLC will help The Beatles: Rock Band to have a longer tail than its contemporary rival, but the first shot in this particular battle of the bands has been fired by Activision.
Elsewhere, Io's underrated Mini Ninjas snuck into the charts at 15, while TimeGate's multiplayer shooter Section 8 managed to burn in to 32nd spot - no mean feat in such a busy week. Still no place, sadly, for Nintendo's Metroid Prime Trilogy, which didn't trouble the All-Formats Chart compilers during launch week, and dropped further down the Wii charts in its second week on release.
Guitar Hero coverage available in P3Zine Issue 44 - click here to download it for free!
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