Harmonix Address Rock Band 4’s European DLC Delays

Though the game was built upon a pitch of as near to full backward compatibility to old DLC songs and hardware, European Rock Band 4 owners on PlayStation 4 have seen a few hiccups in that becoming a reality. Hundreds of DLC songs are currently unavailable on the EU PlayStation Store.

However, Harmonix have now addressed the issue and explained what’s being done to fix it. In short, they need to continue working with SCEE on the submissions and entitlements that allow the songs to be put up for sale and then downloaded for free by those who already own them. As we’ve seen on a number of occasions in the past, some of this hangs upon the differences between SCEE and SCEA certifications.

They clarified what’s been going on with a handy set of bullet points:

• There are currently 431 songs with issues on PlayStation Store in the SCEE region.
• We expected we’d be able to say “it’s fixed” a lot sooner than it has turned out to be.
• While we’ve made progress on the North American (SCEA) side, we appreciate it may have been frustrating for players to see less movement on the SCEE side and this is due to slightly different technical processes across the stores.
• Our DLC producers have been working very closely with their counterparts at SCEE all along to identify and solve problems in the submission and entitlement process as they come up.
• The SCEE folks have outlined a solution which will resolve the lion’s share of marketplace issues in one bulk update. For some more in depth information, the development work behind the scenes to ensure that our existing PS3 content is transferred across to PS4 is significant and there are many variables that need to be checked and built into the development cycle.
• SCEE is already well underway with the process and targeting early December for release for the content to be updated in the Store.
• We’ll communicate any further information as it comes up
• As always, please continue to report any issues you come across with specific tracks as you find them!

Harmonix also noted that actually getting your hands on the new Rock Band 4 hardware has been a little more difficult than it should have been, which might go some way to explaining the game not doing particularly well in the weekly and monthly sales charts. There has only been limited stock to dole out across the world, which is likely to continue through to next year, but they do point to Amazon, Game and Argos in the UK as the best places to get a hold of the hardware bundles.

Source: EU PS Blog