Why Guitar Hero Died: Industry Weighs In

Guitar Hero is dead, and it didn’t leave behind a beautiful corpse. On February 9, Activision announced the end of the once-lucrative franchise after two years of “steeply declining sales.”

“We’ve made the decision to close our Guitar Hero business unit and discontinue development on our previously playing Guitar Hero title for 2011,” said Activision Publishing’s CEO, Eric Hirshberg, during a Q4 2010 earnings call. “Given the considerable licensing and manufacturing costs associated with this genre, we simply cannot make these games profitably based on current economics and demand.”

Guitar Hero‘s death ballad was met by the games community with some mournful recollections of good times spent with plastic guitars and pitchers of beer, but very little surprise. Walk into any electronics retailer in the country and you’ll see dusty pyramids of boxed, plastic instruments that nobody seems to want anymore.

Guitar Hero was the hottest thing from 2005 through 2007. Even the long-running animated sitcom South Park parodied the series with an episode titled Guitar Queer-O, wherein protagonist Stan reaches the heights of fame for his skill with the game, and then crashes hard when he becomes addicted to another game titled Heroin Hero.

Every popular game franchise hits a low point, but even series that 15 through 20 years of age manage to sell millions of titles. What went wrong with Guitar Hero?

The primary word flying around the industry and the community is “oversaturation.” Guitar Hero fittingly lived a rock star’s existence: It rose fast, played hard, overindulged, and died young. Kotaku puts things into perspective with its own tribute to the life and death of the series:

“Guitar Hero: Van Halen [was] a title even Activision seemingly regretted since it was giving copies away to people who bought Guitar Hero 5. (…) It was derided by critics and shunned by fans, selling barely 250,000 copies worldwide. To recap, then, in 2009 Activision released five Guitar Hero games. Five. In a single year.”

Most game publishers are guilty of milking a popular franchise, but as Wedbush-Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter points out, it’s not a good idea to keep releasing sequels when the audience has barely had time to experience what’s on its plate. “[Harmonix/Activision] created a peripheral game that really didn’t require people to upgrade their peripherals, and gave them so much music with each game, that few ever really tired of playing the same 85 songs over and over again,” he says.

Sometime in 2008, the franchise’s popularity not only began dwindling with gamers, but with retailers, too. Stocking instrument-based games is a complicated matter in brick-and-mortar game stores, which are often hurting for shelf space even as far as normal-sized games are concerned.

“Guitar Hero specifically suffered from feature stagnation,” suggests James Brightman, the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of IndustryGamers.com. “There’s only so much the various developers who followed in Harmonix’s footsteps could do to improve upon the formula, and gamers really didn’t care about the Guitar Hero characters – they just wanted to rock out. So, Activision made the mistake they always make: They milked it to death. It became hugely cost prohibitive because of the plastic instruments and the cost of licensing songs from music studios. This was a big bone of contention between the publisher and music industry.

“On top of that,” Brightman continues, “there was a lot of resentment and push back in the last few years from retailers because they’d be stuck with big box inventory, and they couldn’t sell enough of them anymore. From what I understand, Activision would try to leverage its more popular games like Call of Duty with retailers to make sure they take the quickly declining Guitar Hero and DJ Hero games.”

Chris Dring, Deputy Editor at MCVUK.com, concurs. “It is a shame,” he says. “Guitar Hero, DJ Hero and Rock Band all remain excellent products and we didn’t really see a drop in quality during their time. However, consumers became disinterested and their attentions were drawn to other music games, such as Ubisoft’s Just Dance franchise – a game that doesn’t have the same cost attached to it as Guitar Hero with its expensive peripherals.”

But Talmadge Blevins, the Editorial Director for IGN Entertainment’s games division, wonders if maybe Activision had planned to cut open the golden goose all along. “I don’t believe anyone — not even Activision — thought releasing two and sometimes three music games per year was sustainable over the long haul,” he says. “They recognized a flash-in-the-pan genre and wrung it for all it was worth, which unfortunately probably lead to its demise earlier than it could have been had they spaced it out a bit more.”

Nobody doubts that Guitar Hero needs to go into retirement. The question is, for how long? Is the franchise buried? Or is there potential for a reunion tour?

Jesse Divnich, VP of Capital Research and Communications at Electronic Entertainment Design and Research (EEDAR), keeps the faith. “I wouldn’t classify Guitar Hero as ‘dead’,” he says, “but rather ‘hibernating’.” It may take three to five years, and likely a whole new generation of consoles, but I see a possibility of a short revival in the future.

“Activision is a methodical company, and their continued dominance hinges on the growth of their franchises, not the decline. The resources that would have been used to create the next Guitar Hero will be best served on creating new intellectual properties. There is absolutely nothing Activision nor anyone could have done to save the music genre. We should remember Guitar Hero for what it was, not where it’s at now.”

In the meantime, Guitar Hero, you’re as free as a bird, now.

About Nadia Oxford
Nadia is a freelance writer living in Toronto. She played her first game at four, decided games were awesome, and has maintained her position since. She writes for 1UP.com, Slide to Play, GamePro and other publications, and is About.com’s Guide to the Nintendo DS.

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