Bad news for all you Guitar Hero fans out there. Activision has announced that the popular game will not return.
This is also very bad news for about 500 of Activision’s employees, who lost their jobs today because of the decision.
Says Activison, “Due to continued declines in the music genre, the company will disband Activision Publishing’s Guitar Hero business unit and discontinue development on its Guitar Hero game for 2011.” The company also stated that the high cost of licensing the music and producing the game contributed to the decision to end the franchise.
In a related note, Activision also announced they are discontinuing the development of True Crime: Hong Kong.
The decision to close the Guitar Hero division seems to be related to Activision’s announcement that their product sales weren’t as strong as they had hoped for the last quarter. And Guitar Hero’s sales from their most recent game, Warriors of Rock, were not a good sign to begin with. The total copies sold for the game were 86,000, which pales in comparison to Guitar Hero III’s sales of 1.5 million copies in just a few months after its release.
Guitar Hero’s rival Rock Band hasn’t been doing all that well either. Just a few months ago Viacom announced that the developers of the game, Harmonix, were being sold and they had closed down MTV Games publishing division.
However, Activision feels that it will make up for the losses in the end. They are planning to refocus their efforts on their more successful franchises such as Call of Duty and the company’s Blizzard division. Maybe one day the music video game genre will rise again, but for now it seems we’ve reached the end of pretending we can play music on plastic game controllers.
[G4]
[The Wall Street Journal]
[Wired]
Image courtesy of IGN