Battleborn Is Coming To Rock Band 4, Get The Details

Harmonix and Gearbox Software have teamed up for a Battleborn and Rock Band 4 crossover. During PAX East this weekend in Boston, Massachusetts, CEO of Gearbox, Randy Pitchford, revealed that their upcoming first-person shooter would be making an appearance in the music-rhythm game.

Gamespot is reporting that during another panel throughout the weekend the two developers plan on revealing more about the crossover between Battleborn and Rock Band 4, but for now we know that two of the characters from Gearbox Software's first-person shooter, Thorn and Miko, will appear in Rock Band 4 as DLC characters. You can check out the image below.

Gamespot notes that this isn't the first time that Harmonix featured a crossover with another game in the Rock Band series, with the developers previously having featured the Vault 111 costume from Fallout in the title.

The interesting thing about it is that Rock Band is not the IP that it used to be. The game has kind of fallen wayward from the glory days of the music-rhythm genre where everyone was out there buying up those plastic guitars and drum kits to play the game with their friends. After Activision over-saturated the market with countless Guitar Hero games and their spin-offs (with equally absurd amounts of DLC), gamers in general lost interest in the music genre (this also happened around the same time when Tony Hawk Pro Skater games had been pumped out too often and at low quality, killing off the series for a while on major platforms).

Despite Harmonix getting back into the music-rhythm game with Rock Band 4, it didn't entirely turn out too well. The game still didn't sell enough to warrant a release on PC, resulting in Harmonix having to resort to crowd-funding to finish off porting the title to PC.

Guitar Hero Live, another recent reboot of a classic franchise, didn't fare too much better, with the sales of the game coming in under par and the developers getting hit with layoffs in the process.

I do wonder if this foreshadows the sales of Battleborn? Getting in bed with a series that hasn't been selling quite so well doesn't seem like the best way to promote a brand new IP to get people interested in the MOBA-inspired title. Lately more people seem to be talking about Borderlands more than Battleborn.

Nevertheless, Gearbox Software will soon be facing off against another colorful shooter coming out of Blizzard's wheelhouse in the form of Overwatch. Both games are due out in May for the Xbox One, PS4 and PC, so we'll see if having a few of Battleborn's characters featured in Rock Band 4 will help with its marketing potential.

Expect to learn more about the crossover between the shooter game and the music-rhythm game soon enough, as more details are set to emerge for the upcoming DLC for Rock Band 4.