14 DAY TRIAL // Pretty soon after suggesting that the Guitar Hero might no longer feature in the long-term plans of the company, video game publisher Activision Blizzard has offered a clarification on its position, saying that the franchise is taking a break at the moment and that it could return in full force in 2012 or later.
Dan Winters, who is the vice president at publisher Activision in charge of relations with developers and acquisitions, has told GamesIndustry.biz in an interview that, “Actually, just to clarify, we're just putting Guitar Hero on hiatus, we're not ending it.”
He added, “We're releasing products out of the vault - we'll continue to sustain the channel, the brand won't go away. We're just not making a new one for next year, that's all.”
Activision earlier said that no games linked to Guitar Hero would be launched or developed during 2012 although both Warriors of Rock and DJ Hero 2 are set to receive downloadable content that was created before Activision decided to temporarily pull the plug on Guitar Hero.
When the announcement about Guitar Hero was made, Activision said that the series had seen an important decline in sales in the last few years and suggested that the money invested in it could produce better results with other series or even with new intellectual property.
The Guitar Hero hiatus has resulted in about 500 employees being laid off.
The entire music simulation genre has been facing hard times, with overall parent company Viacom choosing to sell developer Harmonix, the creator of the Rock Band franchise and the developer or recent Kinect motion tracking hit Dance Central.
Harmonix has been picked up by an investment firm and the company says that it is working on new titles in the music space which will seek to redefine the market and attract those who have a Rock Band or Guitar Hero game but are no longer interested in its mechanics.