Long tail expected for DJ Hero

Ahead of the release of Activision’s DJ hero in the UK this Friday, the co-founder of Guitar Hero Kai Huang has stated that a slow start at retail is not to be unexpected – though the title’s overall sales curve could prove more impressive.

We’re not expecting a typical videogame curve where you sell the majority of the units in the first month and then it decays quickly,” Huang told IGN.

We’re expecting this to be the type of game that may come out of the gate a little bit slower, but continue to grow over time.”

Huang added that he also expects that the series’ true success could come in future iterations as exposure and understanding of the title slowly grows.

We’ve got a bit of a head start, people have an understanding what music games are, it has the ‘Hero’ brand on it,” Huang added. But at the same time, people don’t know what a DJ game is, they don’t know what you’re supposed to do. Our strategy again is to focus on in-store demos.

If you look at Guitar Hero 3, which to date has been the most successful Guitar Hero game selling 12m units, it did take three iterations to get the game out there and for people to know how it works.”