Guitar Hero: Does anyone actually care?

Picture the scene. It's a cold, miserable Wednesday night in the United States, and your games business is going down the pan. It had, around four or five years previous, acquired the rights to publish a unique game from an indie developer, and, following years of selling millions of copies, you decide to tear it up.

Obviously it's a lot more complicated than it appears, but Activision (now merged to form Activision Blizzard) are finally axing (sorry) once massive franchise Guitar Hero.

Once we clear our ears of the devastated screams from post-pub metalheads, we look back, and we see that this move hasn't come out of boredom. The fact is, incredibly, the public simply don't play rhythm games any more.

I only discovered this recently, but the machines which usually sit vacantly gathering dust in arcades across the UK playing techno music and sporting flashy arrows and clunky sprites dancing are actually the height of popularity in the teenage United States and Japan.

Dance Dance Revolution (often just DDR) is played by stamping on the mat beneath the player in time with the beat of the puce music the machine emits.

But even there, despite being a console game in conjunction, the sales of said standalone game don't even lay a finger on the amount of money inserted into these machines by sweaty intoxicated youths.

Rhythm games, a genre which Guitar Hero and failed sister series DJ Hero fall into, have generally seen their sales suffer in recent years. Back in 2005, when DDR was popular even over on this side of the Atlantic, Guitar Hero's birth gave those too "cool" to jump around like a mental patient a way to show that they too had a good sense of timing.

The series was a profitable one, shifting 25 million copies over the course of its existence, and earning the company a cool $2 billion.

However, after Guitar Heroes I, II, III, IV and V, plus a number of band-centred ports and hand-held versions, consumers had just gotten bored, not bothering (or not being able to afford) to buy every version - especially as the gameplay was identical each time.

Activision Blizzard, however, hardly have no backup plan. Despite axing these games, it still takes in a massive amount of revenue through titles such as the record-breaking Call of Duty: Black Ops - which has now easily passed the $1 billion mark in worldwide sales - and the latest World of Warcraft instalment, Cataclysm.

So perhaps it's not a surprise to see the company get rid of the series, but there are those who still enjoy whacking out a good ten minutes of "Free Bird" on Expert, just to remind them that life isn't easy.

Joe Sutherland
@foxhuntingx