Rock Band DLC Licenses Expiring, Some Content Being Pulled

Some DLC could be disappearing in the future.

The licenses for some of Rock Band’s DLC are expiring.  While some of the licenses are being renewed, some of it is not, Harmonix have said.  Any DLC that the licenses aren’t renewed for will be pulled from the Rock Band store and won’t be available for purchase any more.

In a post on Facebook, Harmonix said “When licensing songs for release for any platform, including DLC, agreements include term limits on how long the content may be sold on a given platform. This isn’t specific to Rock Band – it’s something that exists in pretty much all licensing agreements.”

The full details of how you will be affected are as follows: –

• If you’ve already bought these tracks, nothing changes. Tracks that you’ve purchased/downloaded are yours. Relicensing should not affect content already in your library.
• Select legacy tracks, primarily from the earliest DLC releases, may no longer be offered for new purchase in the Rock Band Store. Again, if you’ve already purchased these tracks you should be entirely unaffected.
• If for any reason you need to redownload this content (i.e. in cases of console transfer, hard drive space management, etc.) you should be able to do so even if that content is no longer available for new purchasers in the store.

Metallica Pack 01, which includes ‘Ride The Lightning’, ‘Justice For All’ and ‘Blackened’, has already been pulled from the store, and Harmonix have stated that they will give advance notice of songs being pulled as soon as they know it’s going to happen.

Source: Eurogamer