With the launch of C3X and the Tour, we want to collaborate with as many game communities as possible and potentially add new game formats. That outreach effort starts with Clone Hero, as we made clear in our announcement. For that reason we, the C3X management, are addressing the status of our relationship publicly so anyone is up to speed. We hope this will lead to a great future of fun for all players and authors.

Clone Hero is a positive influence and a great force in the rhythm gaming world

We officially recognize the outstanding contributions of the Clone Hero developers to the rhythm gaming community. Our official position on the Clone Hero community is that it’s great to see more and more people pick up authoring tools and release content that can be enjoyed by an ever growing number of players. We also know there are excellent Clone Hero authors as some of them are also in our community.

At this time we have no beef whatsoever with any player using any of our customs converted for Clone Hero and no beef with anyone converting our content giving proper credit, in fact we want to show our support for Clone Hero by ensuring that all of our upcoming C3X content are made available immediately upon release. This is our official position, anything else posted by anybody else is a personal view and not a community endorsed opinion. Individual authors can of course speak for themselves and they retain the ability to allow or disallow use of their content on an individual basis.

The size of the Clone Hero community is really amazing and we commend them for the work they did to achieve this result

The C3 community did find itself upset at some of the positions some in the Clone Hero community has taken

1) The first issue stems from the lack of communication regarding use of our content. We are thrilled that our work is enjoyed on multiple platforms (our official releases were all converted for Wii, PS3 and PS use). However we were disappointed that nobody in the Clone Hero admin ranks ever wrote us a single line saying “Hey guys, we wanted to let you know we are taking advantage of the huge archive of songs you produced and converting them for Clone Hero. Thanks so much for all the hard work!” C3 itself was born after another successful project like GHtoRB3 and we not only worked with them but we eventually absorbed all their content, hosted it on our servers at our expense and promoted their work. This choice has understandably led to some friction, because we are not talking about some songs being used to create more complete versions but an entire conversion of our own catalogue with no thanks at all.

2) Compounding to the first issue, a while back we started noticing, completely unchallenged by mods and admins, some unfortunate comments about the quality of the content that in reality we know has been downloaded and enjoyed by the vast majority of the Clone Hero community. We want to be perfectly clear: people are allowed their own opinion and members of the C3 community have their own views on the game and on charters, but that situation has made unhappy the same authors that produced content that the Clone Hero community has enjoyed. I won’t reiterate which comments and the frequency: anyone who knows what we’re talking about understands them, anyone who doesn’t has no need to be exposed to them. We can’t and won’t suppress personal views nor we would ask any other community to do so, but we do ask our own members to be grateful to any author posting content and as a community we felt badly about the wrong and false information posted.

We want to move forward and not discuss the past but it’s important to explain any issue we had.

Some in the Clone Hero community were upset at their charts being converted for Rock Band 3 without asking their permission

Our policy for C3 official releases has always been to ask for permission to use charts created for FoF and Phase Shift and credit properly. Our policy for the C3 community is to always credit properly, because we can’t police what authors do in private messaging before posting content in terms of permissions. We take the crediting policy extremely seriously: we have reprimanded authors in the past in those very rare cases where the original author discovered they hadn’t been properly credited. In 5 years we have never been asked to pull any content though, actually conversions to Rock Band 3 have introduced great FoF/PS charters to our community and some of them eventually joined our authors community to deliver content in full band format and we cannot be happier for that.

Recently some Clone Hero charters contacted us because some of their charts had been converted to Rock Band 3 without permission, while still being credited. Now, even though that is exactly what almost our entire database had gone through (being converted for Clone Hero without permission), we immediately asked anyone who posted that content to remove it and opened a thread on our forums to let Clone Hero charters explicitly opt out of any future conversion. We have always felt that the more people can enjoy this content the better, but we respect deeply the work done by any author, so we acted promptly. If any Clone Hero charter has felt disrespected because their content has been converted without permission we’re sorry. We acted as soon as this was brought to our attention and provided a way to eliminate the issue for the future. We are sorry some charters are not comfortable with conversions, because we feel it only widens their audience, but we respect their positions. We welcomed Phase Shift with open arms and we intend to do the same with Clone Hero.

Once again, we hope these issues are behind us so we can move forward.

All of the above is approved and signed by C3X Management