New Supercell-backed studio NextBeat is planning to launch a Guitar Hero-inspired rhythm game this year.
The minds behind Beatstar and Country Star announced they were spinning out of Space Ape to go solo as new studio NextBeat yesterday. Supercell is a minority investor in the new company, which also expects to announce a “substantial” external investment round soon.
Cofounders Simon Hade and Olly Barnes are leading the new 30-person outfit, and have been joined by CFO Joe Adams and many other senior Space Ape staffers.
NextBeat plans to release more genre-specific music games, and also look into music-based apps centred upon wellbeing and education. But before all that, there’s a new spin on its successful Beatstar formula incoming.
“For our next genre version we want to go back to what Beatstar players have been telling us they can’t get enough of: nostalgic rock, metal, punk,” Barnes tells us. “Imagine a version of Beatstar but just built around the classic fantasy of Guitar Hero.”
Barnes continued: “We’re really excited about that as the next most obvious evolution of the franchise. We don’t have a timeframe for it but Country Star was a six month project end-to-end so we’re optimistic it will ship this year, but it will really depend on the other projects we’re taking on.”
The idea for a Guitar Hero-inspired iteration of the Beatstar formula had been talked about for some time at Space Ape, after it found that “nostalgic nineties-noughties hard rock and punk” massively outperformed all other music types in the original game, Hade told us.
But Space Ape spun up and launched Country Star first for strategic reasons, he explained. “Country is so heavily concentrated in the US, we could bring serious value to these artists and labels in the form of international exposure.”
“It was also an under-monetised category in gaming which meant the artists we worked with really leaned in and in doing so we built out a platform infrastructure that makes it easy for us to build out a slate of games.”
After rock, NextBeat is also interested in how anime music and EDM could work as standalone Beatstar-like games, said Hade.
“Latin music is a really big audience opportunity for us in terms of reach but it might require a slightly different approach to monetization, same as for Bollywood. But we don’t have any concrete plans formed yet around those genres, unlike rock and metal which we are already leaning into.”
Supercell, meanwhile, is set to take control of remaining Space Ape games Chrome Valley Customs, Fastlane and Transformers as part of its acquisition of the UK studio, which will now become ‘Supercell London’. We’re expecting further detail on where or how they will fit into the Supercell portfolio soon.
