It seems that Harmonix Music Systems Inc set the bar a bit too high when it asked for $1.5 million in crowdfunding to produce a PC version of Rock Band 4, as the game’s Fig campaign has ended after only managing to reach roughly half of its goal.

“How do we feel about the end of the campaign? Disappointed, obviously,” Harmonix said in a final update on the Fig campaign page. “There’s no shortage of people at Harmonix who love Rock Band, and some of us got extra excited at the prospect of bringing back RBN, and even more about getting the chance to expose RB to a brand new audience.”

“But at the same time we learned exactly what we needed to learn: there doesn’t seem to be enough of an audience to make Rock Band for PC a viable project for us right now.”

The final tally for the campaign came in at just under $800K, with roughly 75 percent of that coming from investments rather than normal backers. Since the campaign has failed, that money will not be collected.

Why did it fail?

According to Harmonix, the campaign failed due to a lack of interest from PC gamers, but the studio also took the time to address a number of common criticisms it has received regarding its crowdfunding campaign.

One of the most common complaints seems to have been that $1.5 million is too much for a port of an existing game.

“It’s not, actually,” Harmonix said in its update. “Virtually the entire budget (and remember, that included $500,000 from Harmonix on top of the 1.5 million raised by the campaign) went directly towards game development and testing. We have substantial experience scoping and developing games; we know fairly accurately how much work we need to do.”

“Since we’re using our own engine, it’s not a simple matter of flipping a compiler switch and building the game for the PC.”

While the crowdfunding campaign fell through, Harmonix has not ruled out the possibility that Rock Band 4 could eventually come to PC, but right now the prospects do not look very good.

“We love the PC as a platform, and we’re excited by the possibilities and freedom it allows for User Generated Content, but right now we don’t have any specific plans to make it happen.”

Image courtesy of Harmonix Music Systems Inc