Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Guitar Hero

                          I like everyone else was saddened to hear about Guitar Hero being no more!  Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, released in 2010, will be the last game in the music game series for the foreseeable future, Activision said Wednesday.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.
                          T
he drastic move comes after significant industrywide declines in the music game business. In 2007, Activision sold 1.5 million copies of Guitar Hero III in its first month of sales. Last year, Activision only sold 86,000 copies of the latest game in the series, Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock. Slowing sales of chief competitor Rock Band led Viacom to sell maker Harmonix and close the MTV Games publishing division.Activision said that the decline of the game genre, plus the high costs of licensing music and producing the games, led it to close the business.

               
The publisher will also cancel upcoming game True Crime: Hong Kong. It said the cancellation of these two projects and the layoffs will affect 7% of its roughly 7000 employees worldwide, or about 500 people total. But Activision said that it expects its net headcount to bounce back to that 7000 number by the end of the year, since it is making further investments into a new massively multiplayer online game from its Blizzard division, makers of World of Warcraft, and into new Call of Duty projects like a free-to-play game for the Chinese market and a “suite of online services” for players of the military shooter games called “Project Beachhead.”

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