Earlier this year, Viacom announced plans to sell off Cambridge-based Harmonix, creators of the Rock Band and Dance Central franchises. You didn’t expect it to get ugly did you?

Gamasutra reports that Harmonix founders, along with a group of now ex-shareholders have filed a lawsuit against Viacom for failing to pay on performance based incentives for the Rock Band franchise.

The lawsuit claims that the acquisition deal promised that Harmonix shareholders would be awarded with 3.5 times any gross profit of the Rock Band franchise over $32 million in 2007, a deal that Gamasutra states had “no cap.” A similar deal applied to 2008 for profits over $45 million. According to the suit, the shareholders allege that Viacom negotiated a deal with EA that intentionally raised Rock Band profits, but lessened what was to be received by Harmonix.

As of this writing, Viacom has yet to comment on the suit or the allegations.

Media giant Viacom has announced that they plan on selling Harmonix, the Cambridge-based game developer responsible for Dance Central on Kinect and the Rock Band franchise.

The move comes on the heels of word that Harmonix has recorded its fourth straight year of loses, and that sales of music genre games like Rock Band and Activision’s rival Guitar Hero series (which was also created by Harmonix) in recent years. Just how bad are things for the developer? Viacom revealed in a regulatory filing that Harmonix had a net loss of $87 million on $362 million in revenue in 2009 and a net loss of $24 million on $678 million in revenue in 2008.

Harmonix has many potential suiters for a buyout, including Electronic Arts, which has a long standing publishing deal with the firm, and Activision, who may look to reacquire the studio in an effort to regain a larger, nearly complete, portion of the music video game genre.

Stick with Blast Magazine for more on this developing story.

MTV Games announced Wednesday an agreement with famed film and television producer Jerry Bruckheimer to develop a new video game studio.

Viacom, parent company of MTV and MTV Games, hopes to capitalize on the producer’s entertainment and drama successes and build Bruckheimer’s original style into modern interactive entertainment.

“Video games represent a new and innovative medium for what we’ve always tried to do, which is to tell great stories,” Bruckheimer said. “But this medium is unique in that it gives the player control over how those stories unfold.”

The new gaming studio will work on all phases of game creation from concept to marketing, MTV Games said in a statement Wednesday. MTV will tap Jeff Yapp, executive vice president of programming enterprises, and Bob Picunko, VP of electronic games and interactive products to work directly with Bruckheimer’s studio.

The resulting games will have the benefit of immense targeted marketing on all MTV/Viacom television networks and Internet channels, which will attempt to generate a buzz among the MTV fan base and translate that into sales.

MTV announced in August that they would invest more than $500 million over the next two years info developing interactive products. They have already seen success after purchasing Harmonix in 2006. Harmonix developed the original Guitar Hero games as well as the new hit, Rock Band.

Bruckheimer is responsible for some of the biggest movies and television shows ever including Top Gun, The Rock, Black Hawk Down, Crimson Tide, Bad Boys, Gone in 60 Seconds, National Treasure and the Pirates of the Caribbean series. He also produced King Arthur, which is a great watch if you are looking for something that rings somewhere between Braveheart and [insert any medieval movie here].

Bruckheimer is no stranger to video games. Many of his properties have been turned into games, but most of them have met minimal success due to low budgets and the stigma of movie-to-video-game titles. Games included:

• A dark ages tale of the knights of the roundtable in “King Arthur,” which saw a PS2/Xbox/GC adaptation to reviews in the 6′s and 7′s
• Highly (financially) successful game ports of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” series
• Awful mobile phone ports of National Treasure
• Bad Boys: Miami Takedown on the Playstation 2, one of the worst of a thousand games to hit the PS2
• A series of poorly reviewed PC games based on the CSI television show
• A whole bunch of Top Gun flight sims

Bruckheimer also has a movie coming out in 2009 based on the the Prince of Persia video game series called “Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.”

It’s a fair bet that future Bruckheimer-title-based video games will have the financial and technical backing of this new studio. No word yet on the original content they are looking to develop, but if Bruckheimer is making a serious leap into the video game world, it’s definitely worth paying attention.