Reply With QuoteI still haven't played a single of round of guitar hero or rock band. Perhaps now prices will fall quickly on one of the older guitar bundles...
... and True Crime 3. Rumored a few hours ago ahead of the latest fiscal report, now confirmed:
I guess this was to be expected given the sales of the most recent titles. Not exactly a shocking announcement. I wonder if Tony Hawk is back at Neversoft now.At the same time, due to continued declines in the music genre, the company will disband Activision Publishing's Guitar Hero business unit and discontinue development on its Guitar Hero game for 2011. The company also will stop development on True Crime: Hong Kong™. These decisions are based on the desire to focus on the greatest opportunities that the company currently has to create the world's best interactive entertainment experiences.
I still haven't played a single of round of guitar hero or rock band. Perhaps now prices will fall quickly on one of the older guitar bundles...
I couldn't care less about Guitar Hero. Activision Tony Hawk'd it, to no one's surprise, and now it's going away. The cancellation of True Crime, however, offends me greatly. That was the most promising open world game on the horizon. I thought Activision was smart enough to know that they have to invest in new games that aren't Blizzard IPs and Call of Duty so that they have new IP to move to after they exhaust their current cash cows. Guess not.
Does Activision have anything left going for it besides Call of Duty and Blizzard? Blizzard has a diverse enough portfolio to keep on going for a long time, but Call of Duty will fall one day, just like Tony Hawk and Guitar Hero before it. With the cancellation of True Crime, I can't wait for that day. The schadenfreude will be off the charts.
Looks like the Tony Hawk brand is also done for now.
They've formed a new studio to build digital Call of Duty content, whatever that means. So one can see clearly the line drawn here between canceling an old cash cow (Guitar Hero) and the True Crime game, and switching resources to more Call of Duty.
I feel dirty having contributed to their madness. I bought their DLC for Black Ops last week, despite the fact that it's so over-priced. That's what peer pressure does. All your friends are buying the new maps, so you have to buy them too. Originally only one of us bought the new map, and we discovered that he couldn't join our game because we didn't own the new maps. So then one by one we all succumbed to this bullshit.
Double post for some reason. Sorry.
Guitar Hero was pretty clearly done for. True Crime saddens me because it looked cool, but it's hardly a new franchise and the franchise's associations are mostly negative as most people seemed to feel the past games sucked.
I like how they claim the entire genre is done-for, not just their shitty corner of it.
This is really shitty news since I have a bunch of ex-coworker buddies at UFG who worked on True Crime: Hong Kong.
My deepest hope is that this opens up HMX to pick up all the bands Guitar Hero locked away. I'd like to get some Soungarden (back) and Tool in my RB please.
My understanding is that Kotick's business model is to squeeze the profits out a franchise as quickly as possible, and then simply move on to the next franchise when the existing one runs dry. It sounds good in the short term, but it discards the notion of brand loyalty, not to mention employee loyalty.
- Alan
I know at least one person personally affected by this.
I wonder if the games industry in LA will ever recover?
That may happen eventually, but I wouldn't hold my breath. I would imagine they've got these bands under contract at least until when Guitar Hero 6 would have launched, if not longer. And since Activision is going to want to try and clear as many units of Guitar Hero 5 as possible, I doubt they will voluntarily release the bands from the contracts.Originally Posted by Rorschach
Given the problems Harmonix seems to be having, I'm not feeling bullish about the future of music games. Which is a shame, because I still find Rock Band to be wonderfully compelling as a party game.
The Guitar Hero franchise was just out classed. Look at The Beatles: Rockband (Beautiful) compared to Guitar Hero: Van Halen (Seriously VH, you signed off on that?????).
Now, I haven't seen Greenday:Rockband...but christ, it can't look anywhere near as aweful as GH:VH. No wonder they were giving that shit away.
I got GH:VH for free when I bought the only GH game I own...i've played both once and bought no DLC.
On the other hand, I've played the shit out of RB 1, 2 and 3 and though I don't buy everything DLC, I own around 300 DLC songs for RB, mostly the classic rock stuff.
I've have bought all the pro upgrades recently beside the london calling and bob marley stuff.
I'll buy the Stevie Nicks thing next week because it has a pro upgrade, but the other songs in that pack don't interest me...well, I may buy Paradise because I sing online a lot also and I've always loved that song.
Ahhh Stevie..I will always remember you this way...
Isn't Dance Central doing pretty well?
And with GH out of the picture, sure RB's prospects will pick up a bit?
The gaming industry in Vancouver is still smarting from the layoffs and studio shutdowns since 2008. The high cost of living and the low tax incentives (compared to Quebec and Ontario) on top of the strong Canadian dollar, is making it more and more expensive to develop games in Vancouver.
True, but that isn't the reason for so many cancellations and flops coming out of Vancouver for the past three years.
Wasn't a lot of the True Crime team coming off the cancellation of Scarface 2 in mid-2008?
If it wasn't business as usual, I would think that Activision's goal in life is to fuck people who works or has ever worked at Radical Entertainment. I can't shake off the image where they are keeping Prototype 2 alive simply to make sure that they have someone to fuck once everyone else has given up and left the industry.
So basically Axedivision is closing Bizzare Creations, Neversoft, Freestyle, and reducing Radical by half or more. Did I forget anyone?
There were layoffs at Ravensoft a while back.
According to Gamasutra, Neversoft is still largely intact and working on a new IP.
No, the last Radical halving was almost exactly one year ago (they still have 6 months before the next one!). True Crime was being done by independent studio United Front Games, which was founded by ex-Radicalites that were mostly laid off during the first halving of Radical, right after the Acti-Blizz merger.
Duty: The Call Thereof.
Depends on the contracts signed but I wouldn't be surprised if Activision keeps anyone they can locked up to try and grab some tail end sales and maybe a bit of DLC. There's very little reason for them to let any of them go if they can keep them for nothing.
You could see this coming a mile away. Way to run yet another franchise into the ground!
Hey if it makes more room for Rock Band to continue then I'm all for it. Sorry for the people who got laid off, but if the market isn't big enough for Acti-Blizzard's financial requirements then I'm glad they got out and let RB do their thing.
One thing that I missed was a mention that the entire music games division shut down. (Can't remember the article right now.) Does that mean DJ Hero is dead too?
DJ Hero was DOA, why would they keep it?
They got a sequel and the PR announcements to date have said they did fine. I also read a lot of good things about DJ Hero 2...
Not that I own the game(s) or particularly care. Just wondering if it got buried in the headline that GH is dead.
[EDIT]Looks like there's confirmation that DJ Hero is dead too. 7 Studios is confirmed closed, etc. etc. [/EDIT]
Last edited by Rorschach; 02-10-2011 at 11:14 AM. Reason: Ah, there you go.
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