The Guitar Hero video game series has been discontinued.

[Shadow Stalker]

Activision, the game’s publisher, has announced the game series’ end due to general declines in the music genre and a renewed focus on online opportunities. This decision will result in the loss of jobs for about 500 of its employees and between $35 and $50 million in total severance costs paid by the company to these former workers!

It appears that the bursting of the music game bubble has affected more than just Guitar Hero. Viacom has recently sold Harmonix, the developers of Rock Band. Harmonix is also experiencing layoffs.

Read more about the end of Guitar Hero.

Source: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/3...On_Digital.php

[rewak]

Pretty inevitable really, the games are all identical and people aren't going to shell out money time and time again for the same experience (and usually a new controller to go with it since they liked making sure older ones wouldn't work with newer games)

[TheSelfishGene]

Wow so the Guitar Hero development team had about 500 people in it?
Am I interpreting that right?

I suppose there'd be alot of work for legals and thinks making sure all dues are paid and copywritten tracks licenced correctly etc, but still that number sounds huge to me.

Shame that so many people have to lose their jobs.

I've never gotten into the games myself, but we had a houseparty last week and someone hooked up guitar hero and some people had alot of fun with it, which was good.

[Branden_Lucero]

i'm glad. all Guitar Hero was becoming was a wannabe Rock Band.

[DONNIemo]

Guitar Hero will always be remembered for starting the craze over in the western world, and it was very very good early on, but yes just slowly started to die, I think when the whole "band" play thing came in is when i lost interest (im looking at you World Tour and 5) as I only ever wanted single player.

I hope RockBand still holds on as I love you more! They will most likely just stick with downloads now as they have no competition anymore.

R.I.P. Guitar Hero.

[nemesiswontdie]

Sucks that people lost their job or what ever but I'm glad that GH is over. I mean the last good one was 2. Every one after 2 only had about maybe 1 or 2 songs that was actually good on it. I mean 4 had 3 Tool songs and thats pretty much the only good thing that came out of it. But thats just my opinion. If I want to play a guitar, I'll pick up my real guitar and read the tabs on a tab site.

[leftshoe18]

That's too bad about Guitar Hero. They were fun games to play if you wanted to just kill some time. I didn't think it would end anytime soon...