Once in a good fortune, an accessory becomes sufficiently essential that support for it becomes widespread, and probably the most important of all of these, the memory card, was then obsoleted by cloud connectivity and storage. Memory cards are only needed now for retro use on the earliest systems that supported them: Neo Geo, Dreamcast, Playstation, Playstation 2, and Gamecube. Though they are supported on PS3 and Xbox 360, both of those systems supported hard drives from day one, and both support cloud storage now.
Another great peripheral, Nintendo's Rumble Pak, became common as a build-in with controllers in generations moving forward. It's not true force feedback, but there is definitely an immersion improvement that went beyond mere oohs and aahs for rumble to catch on as significantly as it did. Thousands of games ever since have supported rumble effects, publishers knowing that virtually every player would have a controller that worked with it.
Unfortunately, the more likely outcome for any peripheral or accessory is that it fails in the market, or succeeds for a short time and then dies off with no further support. Ask anyone who bought Tony Hawk Ride for last generation's systems, which came bundled with an interesting skateboard controller you actually stood on, and which was used for Ride and the Tony Hawk Shred series and nothing else ever.
Some peripherals sold somewhat well initially but became so irrelevant afterward that stores won't even take them in trade now. These weren't in-generation to many of my readers unless you had kids, but who here remembers Skylanders? They are so much plastic clutter now. Watch as they become sought after by 2025. (Or not. Probably not.)
Even Nintendo at its 8-bit peak couldn't keep the Zapper light gun relevant.
Fortunately, often a game is playable even without a key accessory or custom controller. Or else the key accessory or custom controller is sufficiently simplistic that a third-party aftermarket solution appears, even for narrow ranges of games, or even single games. Hyperkin makes an optical mouse for the Super Nintendo, to replace the out-of-print SNES Mouse that was required for Mario Paint and barely worked on anything else that was actually released in North America. So, future-facing peripheral support is not unheard of. It is sometimes done.
But sometimes not.
To explain why this is even an issue, a recap helps. Harmonix, the programming studio behind the Rock Band series and the first two main Guitar Hero games (the good ones), co-published Rock Bands 3 and 4 with Mad Catz, the controller manufacturer. Unfortunately, unlike the successful Rock Bands 1 and 2 and the spin-off Rock Band: The Beatles, neither Rock Band 3 nor 4 were smash hits. Mad Catz took heavy losses, ultimately buying time by selling off the entire stock and the Harmonix partnership to Performance Digital Products (PDP), known for Smash Bros fight pads for the Wii U and now the Switch. Mad Catz sold their Saitek flight stick brand to stave off death, but still died. Then came back to life, but is now... kinda... who knows. Alive, perhaps. But there are most assuredly no new plastic guitar- and drum-shaped controllers being manufactured anymore.
The lack of any new hardware usually wouldn't be that much of a problem, except for one thing: Player interest is back on the rise, mainly because Rock Band is extremely watchable on streaming. Harmonix and Mad Catz can hardly be blamed for being a few years too early to the e-sports banquet, but that banquet is here now. The Rivals release was successful and there is new music available for download weekly; in fact, Rivals and new DLC are Harmonix's entire Rock Band revenue now, with no hardware revenue from retail channels. PDP periodically slow-rolls some NOS (new old stock) guitars in brown boxes on Amazon at $50 per, but there are long droughts between restocks and no indication of when another will occur, pushing prices up high in the meanwhile.
Fortunately, the game works with any USB microphone. And the Playstation 4's existing PS3 bluetooth controller compatibility extends to the Rock Band 3 instruments just fine, for wireless instruments. The core instrument bundle is obtainable, but expensive, typically a few hundred dollars for either PS3 or PS4 versions.
For the Xbox One, players need either XB1 versions of the instruments, which are much less common than the game software due to digital sales, or they need the Legacy Controller Adapter for their Xbox 360 wireless instruments. The regular bundle, as with the PS4, will set a player back hundreds of dollars, but at least they are circulating for the moment.
To use a MIDI drum kit as preferred by competitive players, PDP made a certified adapter in apparently tiny quantities, that today's secondary market values at right around $300 in used condition. Yeah. (This is different from the MIDI Pro Rock Band 3 adapter for PS3 and Wii, which can be picked up for under $40, and different from the Xbox 360 Legacy Controller Adapter noted in the previous paragraph, which costs only slightly more.) For the time being there is no hardware workaround to this. It's a dealbreaker.
(Thanks to /r/Rockband for help clarifying which hardware works with which drums. I am a guitar and bass player and singer, and drums are the only thing I don't typically play on RB, so I had to learn a little more about the nuances of that. I have the Xbox One wireless official kit to pull out in case a drummer visits and we decide to play, but that likely wouldn't suffice for competitive scoring attempts.)
Will PDP or some other company produce new plastic instruments? It all comes down to whether they think they can make money doing it. There has been a narrow but sustainable aftermarket for dance pad controllers across multiple platforms for Dance Dance Revolution, Stepmania, and Pump It Up, so the market has already accepted some notion of rhythm game controllers continuing to be made. Rock Band will have to show sustained and notable regrowth digitally and on stream before PDP would bother, which is a tough ask when players who might want to play... can't get the instruments at a reasonable cost! So, as this article began, we have a vicious cycle going on.
Rock Band is only one game where the natural attrition of the peripheral supply in circulation impedes access, and it happens to be one I play on the regular, so it's the one I picked for this article. But it's not unique and at least we got a pretty reasonable initial supply of hardware thanks to the series' mass-market reach, and that of its competing series, Guitar Hero. Rhythm games are especially vulnerable to peripheral unavailability because most of them are unplayable or pointless to play without the correct controller. DJ Hero, with its turntable, is definitely limited, but has a far smaller player audience following modern streamers, so the supply of gear in the wild seems sufficient to meet demand, and market prices agree. Nintendo, meanwhile, fortunately manufactured a passing excessive quantity of Bongo controllers for Donkey Konga 1 and 2 and DK Jungle Beat, because those games are at their peak enjoyment during four-player simultaneous play. I'll leave Samba de Amigo's maracas unlinked just because.
If your video game tastes run further afield than music, you might get to run a merry chase for the likes of fishing controllers, biometric sensors, polarized 3-D glasses circa 1987, pocket sonar emitters, trance vibrators, Robotic Operating Buddies, the entire cockpit control panel of a battlemech, and a VECTOR LIGHT PEN. Not even making any of those up. And a surprising number of them sound like a euphemism for some sort of adult toy.
Or you can do what the overwhelming majority of gamers do, I suppose, and just play stuff that uses the system and controllers as supported out of the box every time. Lord knows both the game publishers and the hardware manufacturers have more or less settled there, except when one of them gets the itch or starts feeling limber and then the cycle starts again.
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