Guitar Hero comes to a timely demise

On February 9th, Activision announced they were discontinuing the Guitar Hero franchise, and as a result, their planned 2011 Guitar Hero title was also cancelled. Activision cited “declining interest in the music genre” as their reason, a phenomenon which is quite possibly down to an almost completely saturated market.

Since the release of Guitar Hero III: Warriors of Rock in 2007 (the first Guitar Hero game not to be developed by Harmonix – who now make competitor Rock Band), the two franchises have published 15 different titles between them (excluding mobile versions and DJ Hero). This equates to more than one release every three months on average – an astounding statistic. But each new iteration generally offered little in terms of new functionality – instead, the main purpose was just to add new songs for the user to play. Add to that the hundreds of songs that can be bought from each franchise’s online catalogue and it becomes a distinct possibility that the games start to compete with others from their own series.

Maybe customers became dissatisfied with having to splash out £40 - £50 on each new offering (plus the initial cost of the plastic peripherals), and decided to just stick to the games they already owned, topping up the songs they could play with downloaded ones if they got bored. If this is indeed the case, then Guitar Hero was always going to suffer, as Rock Band has a far vaster downloadable content library. It could also be partially down to the ever-present recession – people’s spending habits have changed, and a new disc for 80 or so songs doesn’t make the cut.

So what does this mean for the future of the music game market? It’s definitely a shame straight from the off – I’ve been a big fan of the genre since Guitar Hero III, and I’m disappointed to see the series go. But in the long run, it’s possible that this announcement may have a bigger impact than it at first seems.

There has never been a clear cut “better” game between the two series, and this required both developers to work hard on new features that would encourage gamers to buy their product over their rival’s. This, like any healthy competition, was advantageous for the consumer, as they were always getting the best deal for their money – if either company got complacent with their game they would lose out on sales. Now that Guitar Hero is gone, Rock Band has no-one to push them to constantly improve their games, and make sure they sign the right deals to get the best songs, which may end up as detrimental to us players.

The future of Rock Band has also seemed a bit murky recently, with Viacom (the owner of published MTV Games) selling Harmonix for the princely sum of fifty dollars. However, Harmonix have assured gamers that this won’t affect them.

Whatever the result, it’s a sad day for fans of the series everywhere.