R.I.P. Guitar Hero

pookdolie

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It's worth mentioning. They announced the end today.

It was certainly a phenomenon in the area of arcade & video gaming...
 
Why are they ending Guitar Hero?

cause they lost their shirts in oversaturation of the market. Music titles no longer sell causing a huge surplus of plastic controllers. Thus Retailers are completely turned aroudn 180 again against these big boxes that will sit on shelves forever cause no one will buy them.

ATVI killed my baby.

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ya you cannt release 2 games a year of the same franchise and still keep it going. its the same damn game but with diffrent songs. music game players are cut from that casual gamer cloth where they can be happy with the same disc for years. just like the wii, the most popular game on the system is the one that came with it and i know plenty of people that never even bough a game once they got the system. ive gone to parties where a half dozen kids are sorrounding a ps2 with the original game having a really good time. which is great, but it doesnt make money.

and walmart just has tons and tons of crappy band game accessories (and tony hawk skate boards) sitting in the electronics section. and for the $3 it cost to play the arcade game you could go to the clearence section and pretty much buy it for home use.
 
Yeah that makes sense, the only Guitar Hero I ever purchased was the second one and I didn't want to buy any others because its the same game just different songs. I read a little bit into it and the writing was definitely on the wall with the insane amount if titles being released.
 
you mean having been released.

It was ideal for the publisher to try to just liscense more content and hire 2nd rate developers to do note charts to it. SERIOUSLY that's what corporate ATVI did.

They diluted the brand and people got bored of it. It was so bad that Rock Band, the superior game, went down with GH in sales.
 
Why are they ending Guitar Hero?

The costs of producing the games are pretty high...

When the games started out, they were all covers... It wasn't until the series started getting hot that they put the original artists on. That shit gets expensive. So you need to keep the sales volume high in order to make money.

The model also depends on hardware sales. People will only buy so many instruments.
 
you mean having been released.

It was ideal for the publisher to try to just liscense more content and hire 2nd rate developers to do note charts to it. SERIOUSLY that's what corporate ATVI did.

They diluted the brand and people got bored of it. It was so bad that Rock Band, the superior game, went down with GH in sales.

Rock Band...now that's when shit got really ridiculous. I don't wanna be all, "I knew this shit was gonna happen", but man...that was a lot of hardware for the average consumer to deal with. There's gonna be a lot of plastic guitars and drum sets in the landfills.

Sorry to hear about your baby, but at least the releases you were involved with will go down in history as serious bench marks.
 
This is not terribly surprising news. To the casual observer, which I certainly am, it kind of seemed like the series was doomed from the start. I mean, there's only so many compelling songs you can package together for new releases. It seemed that after the first few games, the casual audience this game appealed to would be satisfied with the product they already had. There just didn't seem to be enough of an incentive to keep buying the same old thing without other innovation.

I do think it is interesting that the series these games were "inspired" by, Guitar Freaks and Drummania, are still going strong overseas 12 years in. Maybe the difference in demographics is responsible for this. Perhaps, Konami's approach of not relying heavily on licensed music is the key to the series' success. Probably a little of both, I guess.
 
you mean having been released.

It was ideal for the publisher to try to just liscense more content and hire 2nd rate developers to do note charts to it. SERIOUSLY that's what corporate ATVI did.

They diluted the brand and people got bored of it. It was so bad that Rock Band, the superior game, went down with GH in sales.

Not to hijack the thread, but I would like to know why you favor rock band as the superior game.

I have heard arguments both ways, but I know you have an "in" with GH, since you helped develope the controller.
 
Rock Band has a Stratocaster that is actually real guitar. This is where I wish the whole genre would have started instead of being a glorified game of Simon.

In any event, this would have been tough for the Guitar Hero franchise to equal, so it looks like they're taking the cowards way out.
 
The costs of producing the games are pretty high...

When the games started out, they were all covers... It wasn't until the series started getting hot that they put the original artists on. That shit gets expensive. So you need to keep the sales volume high in order to make money.

The model also depends on hardware sales. People will only buy so many instruments.

High production costs? - no actually the production budgets including master recording still were lower compared to other game dev budgets. We actually had broken open the model on how someone could earn in games. Activision simply got too greedy and they just squeezed out everyone else and ruined a delicate balance of it all... It's complicated but I wouldn't point the finger straight at budgets. Budgets can be controlled. GH1 for PS2 had an insanely low budget for a PS2 game.

Yes Hardware R&D and COGS factor into it. It's mostly the issue of inventory. Music games are the hardest games to control what inventory meets the actual sales needs because of the orders for controllers take 3 months to hit your shores. How do you guess how many units a market will absorb when you aren't even done with your game?

Again I will say, the delicate balance was thrown off. Ultimately they were trying to sustain a product line where they completely lost track of what made it good. They even went so far as alienate instrument makers to the point where they were coming up with their own ugly guitar designs.

What the heck is this? And how is that cool? The guitar is supposed to complete the illusion of you playing electric guitar... not break the illusion! How can you not "get that?"
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Sorry to hear about your baby, but at least the releases you were involved with will go down in history as serious bench marks.

Thanks! I would give Harmonix much credit for that but part of me likes to believe that as the Exec Poducer for GH1-2, I knew what I was doing. In publishing we did more than just write checks and approve milestones.

RedOctane owners lied to us that they were not selling the company but heck, I got cashed out on my stock. I knew that ATVI was going to run it into the ground. It's obvious when their side had a HUGE rush of folks just trying to take over GH cause they wanted it simply on their resume. Their attitude was that they needed to "teach us how the big boys do things." I had worked there in the late 90's also. Ultimately all ATVI really knew how to do was write bigger checks.

The VP of marketing at RO once sat with all of us on our team (production and marketing) and asked us why we were better than the guys at ATVI and other publishers from entering this music game market. (even Konami) I was the only person to say anything to her. "because we get it"

Not to hijack the thread, but I would like to know why you favor rock band as the superior game.

I have heard arguments both ways, but I know you have an "in" with GH, since you helped develope the controller.

RB is more about the music. It's more fun. Actually the initial vision of the product was to incorporate the whole 3 piece instrument vision w/out vocals. We found that KRev didn't do anything that we wanted for the game. People don't know it by my first draft of a product vision to HMX was to have 3 instruments and no vocals. By GH2 I also wanted the games to have optional subtitles across the screen. It would have been a super "cheap" feature which would have added tremendous "party play" to the game without distracting the scoring and instrument play.

GH simply tried to be more hardcore and started doing little for entry level and intermediate level play. Rock Band also tried not to super saturate the market place w/ versions. They tried to balance that out with diligent support of DLC and specific software packs marketed toward audiences not DLC savy or for a platform that had difficulty supporting DLC (Wii.)

Band dynamics were also copied by GH. That was pretty lame. Neversoft tried to innovate but IMHO they never did anything really well. This was probably because they were always trying to give ATVI marketers something to bullet point on a box and argue apple to orange features instead of have a vision of where a product is going and completely support that vision with EVERYTHING they could put into the box.

Even all of the people left at RedOctane secretly started hating the GH products that they where shoveling and secretly were playing RB on their own time.

I stopped playing GH entirely after leaving. I have a hard time giving any support to ATVI products now. I don't own Starcraft 2 for this very reason. I'd stop in and try a few songs but ultimately felt like the note charts were souless and there was something always odd about what they were doing with the game. The DS version is a good example of this.

What happened is pretty simple.

Something came out of no where and was doing really well. GH was a game changer for the industry. It was the first music title to break out and compete against every other game genre in retail sales. They had to have it cause it was the only thing they could do to sustain even their goals, aquire something that seemed original and really balanced out their own portfolio of titles. Between shooters, Blizzard and TH; what else did they have?

They ran it into the ground applying their standard business practices. The budgets didn't match with product quality and sales volume... marketing was lame... sales went down year after year... SKUs competed for shelf space... and now they have a HUGE inventory of old product that they have to write off.

Its now all on hold, they wont touch it again untill they figure out how to sustain it and make money once again.

It's going to go the way of Zork...

*EDIT* Sorry to ramble. I probably have more to say on this topic than most that ever worked on GH because of my somewhat unique perspective. I was one of the first to quit actually. Most of this I've only shared with my closer friends as there's not much point in predicting or sharing about what has happened with GH. Most here wont care but I'm just trying to comment on a few things pointed out.
 
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I started playing with Guitar Hero 3 (Wii) and damn that game was addicting. I really messed up my hands a few times because we'd play for like 6 hours.

I bought a Playstation 3 (one of the early 60 gig models with backwards compatibility) specifically so we could play Guitar Hero 1 and 2 (for PS2) and that's where the love afair with Guitar Hero tanked. None of the Guitar Hero 3 PS3 instruments were backward compatible for Guitar Hero 1 and 2. WTF? Luckily I was able to talk Circuit City into taking the return because the boxes said they would work.

So, what did I do? I bought Rock Band! Rock Band ended up being way more fun because you can have 4 (or more) people rocking all at the same time, playing different difficulty levels. I play the drums on hard or expert but if somebody comes over and wants to play on easy, they can play easy while I play on hard. People who aren't into video games often like karaoki, so they sing. Once they see that the easy difficulty is really easy they start playing the instruments too. They've offered suprisingly good songs too. I just bought the cymbal kit for the drums (Rock Band 3) and it's even better.

Since buying Rock Band I never went back to Guitar Hero. It was like a gateway game. Rock Band took that awesome game and made it way better by adding the other instruments.
 
I could never get into that whole Hit-The-Correctly-Colored-Buttons-Exactly-When-We-Want-You-To genre so my eyes are dry about the series ending.

And as a musician, this is the only Guitar Hero controller I would endorse:

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(it's fictional, but you get the idea. five buttons does not a
guitar player make.)
 
I did see a Guitar Freaks arcade machine for sale recently for $199. It sold very quickly.
 
Thanks for the insider insights, Prairied1ll0 .

Funny, as a fan of the franchise, I came to the exact same conclusion about Guitar Hero (post-Harmonix) vs. Rock Band. Guitar Hero's character designs were ugly, and the note charts didn't seem to flow with the music. Rock Band had the best note charts, and the character design was so much prettier than the sad-looking meatheads of GH. But Activision saturated the market, and now everyone except the hardcore is tired of playing all the games. I heard MTV took a bath from licensing the Beatles' music for DLC that hardly anyone bought.

Reminds me of the mid 90's when everyone and their mother had SF II clones and the casual fans got tired of entire genre.
 
Actually the coin-op Guitar Hero is disappearing because those assholes at ASCAP won and were requiring operators to license these machines as "jukeboxes" and pay extremely high license fees because of the music involved. Otherwise ASCAP goons would file copyright infringement lawsuits against the operators claiming this is "public performance" of copyrighted music.
 
For me Guitar Hero died the day part 3 was release. One of the saddest days of my gaming life. Parts 1 and 2 will go down as absolute classics.
 
I have 3 guitars crammed away in my closet, and have not really ever been used.

The whole annoying "click click fucking click!" of a piece of plastic that comes nowhere near playing a real guitar, made me lose interest VERY fast.

GF's step dad has rock band, and the instruments are no different...a real Strat? Not even close.

I think if they had put more into the hardware, so that the interest COULD translate to actually picking up the real thing...the games might have done better for a long time.
As it stands now, the hardware IS nothing more than cheap "Simon-esque" JUNK.
 
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