Good Night to the Rock ‘n’ Roll Era: Rock Band 4 Leaves Digital Storefronts This Weekend

The delisting of the core game will be just the start of a wave of removals. DLC tracks for Rock Band 4 will also see their licenses expire once they hit their 10th anniversary, and will similarly be removed from digital storefronts. If you’ve been waiting to snap up some of those downloadable tracks, the window’s closing.

It’s sad news, obviously, but 10 years is a good run for any game these days—especially one that didn’t quite jumpstart the already faded plastic instruments fad when it was released in 2015. Personally though I was a big fan of Rock Band 4 (along with 2015’s other rhythm game revival, the technically ambitious Guitar Hero Live), and it remained in regular rotation in our house for a few years after its release. I probably need to go plug that Xbox One in and see if there’s any DLC we need to snag before it evaporates.

Despite what Rock Band 4‘s delisting might indicate, there remains an audience for these games. Endless Mode‘s own Madeline Blondeau recently wrote about a high-end new Guitar Hero controller, and apparently there are (perhaps not entirely legal) tools for creating your own song files for these games. The fact that they never really caught back on with a mainstream audience after their late ’00s heyday is a bummer, though, and one more data point to support the obvious case that rock music and rock bands aren’t broadly popular with today’s youth. Oh well: as embarrassing as “rock will never die” old guy hagiography is, I feel okay with the fact that I’ll be listening to and playing guitars for the rest of my days—and, yes, occasionally playing plastic guitars, too, whenever my wife feels like singing some Rock Band.