14 DAY TRIAL // Two days ago, Activision held a conference call, where its subsidiary Blizzard also announced that StarCraft II would roll out a closed beta for the strategy game sometime by the end of this month. But far less fortunate news regarding the big publisher was also made public. According to Kotaku, Activision has started handing out pink slips in massive amounts, as a considerable number of its employees have been cut loose and at least one studio has been completely shut down.
Neversoft and Luxoflux are two of the companies that have already gotten hit, with rumors that Underground Development, the studio responsible for Guitar Hero: Van Halen and the Dave Mira Freestyle BMX series, is heading towards a similar fate.
As for the studio that was completely leveled, the unlucky company is Red Octane, the developer of Guitar Hero 1 and 2, the games that pretty much started the rhythm-game genre. The hardware side of the company, the people that worked for Red Octane developing the plastic instruments, will move over and work directly under Activision, while the rest of the company, the software side, will be entirely left out of job, as the studio has been closed.
Hints of the company's demise began to surface some two weeks ago, when Dan Rosensweig, the boss of the Guitar Hero group, departed from his position, but his replacement did not receive the same COO title that his predecessor held, signaling that the position itself wouldn't be soon needed. Activision has yet to confirm the studio's death, but that's probably just PR red tape being processed.
Activision has already announced that it plans to drastically reduce the amount of SKUs bearing the Guitar Hero name, down from the 25 that were released in 2009 to less than ten in 2010. This could be the main reason for the collapse of Red Octane, but it could also be the other way around, with the number of games dropping because the developers needed to work on them have been cut loose.