If you own an Xbox 360 and a copy of Guitar Hero 3 and Rock Band, you didn't have any problems. Except if you really liked the Rock Band controller and wanted to play with it on Guitar Hero (no reports of that just yet), in which case you were screwed. But that was expected, considering the game came out a full month after GH3, and that it came with extra buttons and switches and such.

If, however, you were one of those people who bought both for the PlayStation 3, then you were out of luck. The Guitar Hero Gibson Les Paul only worked with GH3, and the Rock Band Fender Stratocaster only worked on RB. No friendly relations between Harmonix or parent company MTV and Activisionn, who said they just wanted Harmonix to pay for a license.

While it's cool for Activision to make such a balsy public statement, fans of both music games weren't happy, and for good reason. Sony doesn't want another fiasco, and they decided to step in to ensure all hardware is compatible with all games.

That was late yesterday. Today, Microsoft made a similar announcement, and they both want to ensure that you don't have to buy both sets of hardware to play both games. Which, actually, is diabolically smart. If gamers have less money to spend on software, which both Microsoft and Sony make a cut of, then they obviously will buy less software. Meaning its a no brainer to make sure gamers only have to buy one set of instruments for their music games, but buy all three games.

In our look at the last generation of music games, we stated that while both games were equal overall, Activision and RedOctane did a better job with the hardware. Our preview of Rock Band 2 goes live tomorrow, giving more details on the game's hardware, though we expect to see a high quality level come from Activision as well, who has managed to make more hardware, faster, than rival EA.

Regardless of all that, so far only Nintendo hasn't stepped forward. But we all know that they hate 3rd parties. Maybe when they make their own instruments, we'll hears how they can be used at the same time as developers.

PlayStation Blog and Gamerscore Blog