It wasn’t too long ago that hanging out at Kill-tacular-tron’s house on the weekends, drinking beer and playing Guitar Hero was a regular event – but those days are now few and far between. For the last few years Guitar Hero game sales have been dropping dramatically, so I guess it only makes sense that Activision and Blizzard would eventually have to pull the plug, which is exactly what they did yesterday.
Activision Blizzard will close its music-game business division, laying off hundreds of employees, and cancel the Guitar Hero game that was in development for 2011, the publisher said in a conference call Wednesday.
Activision said that the decline of the genre, plus the high cost of licensing music and producing the games, led it to close the business.
“There was nothing that Activision or anybody could have done to save Guitar Hero,” said Jesse Divnich, vice president of analyst services for Electronic Entertainment Design and Research, in an interview with Wired.com. Divnich said that Activision realizes the “opportunity cost” of continuing to make Hero games when it could instead be putting those resources towards more profitable games.
[Wired]
Guitar Hero III was released back in 2007 and in its first month of release they moved 1.5 million units, compare that to last years release, Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, which sold just 86,000. This combined with last year’s selling of Harmonix by Viacom has pretty much sealed the fate of this once popular gaming genre.
To call this game genre a “fad” may seem a little harsh, but I doubt it’s too surprising. I personally never owned any of these games because frankly I enjoyed just playing it with my friends, some of which who already had copies, and couldn’t justify the cost for a game I would never play by myself. The last few years, the popularity of Rock Band and Guitar Hero seemed to be on the steady decline, even I noticed it just by the amount of desire to play the games by my friends and I. It was a fun game to play for a while, but eventually the repetetiveness of playing a fake plastic instruments wore on us and we moved on to different games. In fact, I don’t think I’ve even picked up a plastic guitar to knock out some “Don’t Fear the Reaper” in at least a year and a half.
Guitar Hero was the original plastic-guitar game, and I know my friends and I, along with many of you out there have spent many a weekend night playing it with friends and have some pretty fun memories of that. That being said, this news doesn’t really bum me out too much – especially since in my opinion each sequel to the game was just the same with a varied track list that may or may not be that good. Besides, should we ever get the hankering to belt out some Weezer with our friends we all know somebody with the game and all the gear, collecting dust in their gaming room.
So, so long Guitar Hero – we all had a great ride.
Are you sad to see this franchise come to an end? How often do you still play Guitar Hero or Rock Band these days! Leave your thoughts in the comments below!