While Viacom, the owner of Harmonix's Rock Band game series, has been vocal in touting impressive sales numbers for the hit music title, what seemed to have been completely glanced over was a recent report by Credit Suisse which indicates that the game series simply has not been profitable since day one.

John Master Lee via www.thekartel.com »

"Looking at music games as part of our NPD analysis, Gamasutra has discovered that U.S. Guitar Hero/Rock Band revenues are down 49% year on year, as discounted hardware and over 20 SKUs flood the market.

June 2009 was the second consecutive month without a Rock Band or Guitar Hero title in the top 20 software titles. The last time the software charts went two months without one of these franchises was in September and October 2007, right before the launch of Guitar Hero II on the PlayStatio..."

Fury via gamasutra.com »

A nice few goodies for you to choose from this week -- Bionic Commando is looking pretty great, Terminator Salvation shows some promise (though taking out T-800s with shotguns and such doesn't seem very realistic or fun to us), UFC fans get the latest in the form of Undisputed, Nintendo launches Punch-Out!!, EA tries out the Wii excercise thing, and DS owners get some cool adventures.

chautemoc via www.shacknews.com »