Analyst: Activision Doesn’t Need Warner

Warner Music recently went on record to say that publishers of music-rhythm games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band should pay more royalty to the record labels. While more money may be the labels’ goals, they forget one thing: the publishers don’t really need them at all.

Or at least that’s what famed gaming analyst Michael Pachter at Wedbush Morgan thinks, bluntly telling Gamasutra that “Activision doesn’t ‘need’ Warner Music at all.”

“There are over one million songs out there–probably two million–and Activision is going to turn fewer than a thousand of them into Guitar Hero songs every year,” he said, adding that “they don’t need to deal with a label that represents less than 20 percent of artists.”