Earlier this year, Activision summarily killed its Tony Hawk and Guitar Hero franchises, shedding almost 500 employees in the process. Yesterday, Tony Hawk himself revealed that his skateboarding franchise wasn’t completely dead, and today we find out from GI.biz that Guitar Hero is in the same boat. According to Activision’s Dan Winters, the series is merely “on hiatus”.
"Actually, just to clarify, we're just putting Guitar Hero on hiatus, we're not ending it," Winters said. "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."
According to Winters, the 'death' of Tony Hawk, Guitar Hero, and True Crime is down to Activision’s renewed focus on certain larger brands.
"That would have been, and still might end up being, a very successful mid-tier opportunity for someone," he said of True Crime. "But, as I said, we changed our business model to where we were going to change our business model to focus disproportionately on three big, huge monsters. Those three monsters are the Bungie, Call of Duty and Spyro titles."
Call of Duty is Activision’s tentpole franchise, and Spyro is the company’s new attempt to pull in a younger audience, but the focus on Bungie is interesting. The studio has immense pedigree, but its new title doesn’t seem to be coming within the next two years, and there’s no way of knowing if the goodwill created with the Halo brand will completely follow them over to a new IP.
2 Comments
April 12, 2011
I'm interested in Bungie's new title(whatever it may be) based on how much I love their Halo games but theres a chance that it might not sell as much as the Halo games despite it being multiplatform. I know that by default it should sell better as a multiplatform game then it would as an exclusive but one need only look at Lost Planet. The first one did good when it was an Xbox exclusive. But then it went multiplatform and the second game hardly sold at all. It's currently sitting in clearance bins around the country.
April 13, 2011
Exclusivity can work (though I will add that Lost Planet eventually came to the PS3) but sales issues for the game went deeper than that. Lost Planet released relatively early in the Xbox 360's life cycle, and between it's then highly detailed graphics and unique scenario attracted a lot of attention. Lost Planet 2 released with comparably little hype and didn't really address many of the issues people had with the first game. I think by the time LP2 came out, gamers just wanted more out of their next gen shooter titles.