Activision may have a slight problem on its hands what with Guitar Hero: World Tour not selling too well. The latest numbers, as one analyst from Electronic Entertainment Design and Research has interpreted for us, suggest that Guitar Hero sales may have peaked. (Please note the distinction between Guitar Hero and “music games;” no one is saying that music games are dead.)
This is the bad news, as articulated by the analyst:
Currently, we expect unit sales to decline by more than 50 percent series-over-series for November. This is coming off the October month where series-over-series units declined by more than 60 percent.
A couple reasons for this, maybe. (Who knows for real, in other words.) One is that Rock Band 2 has been reviewed more favorably than GH:WT, suggesting that it’s the better game. (Doug essentially says the same thing in his comparison between the two.) When forced to chose between the two (“you can only have one game this year for Christmas, son, seeing as though mommy and daddy are out of work now”), the rational person is going to pick the better game. Let’s not forget that many stores were selling Guitar Hero 3 cheaply on Black Friday, which could have eaten into GH:WT’s sales. It could also be that GH fans put a premium on guitar play rather than the whole “we’re a fake band, together!” camaraderie of GH:WT.
But what Activision must be terribly afraid of is that people are tiring of the Guitar Hero franchise. Considering that the company’s CEO, Bobby Kotick, sees the Guitar Hero franchise as a cash machine—the low sales of Mirror’s Edge will only reinforce, unfortunately, the notion that new IPs aren’t worth big publisher’s time—news that sales have slowed won’t be too well received. Also, he killed the Ghostbusters game, which, as a child of the late 1980s and early 1990s I cannot agree with.
But like I said, who knows. It could just be that people don’t have as much disposable income anymore, and spending $200 on a video game is no longer a viable option for many people.
via 1UP
200$ is too expenesive for a game, you can get an xbox 360 at that price. many famalies will likely go for just the plain GH3 because of that
the main thing is that it has became a yearly franchise like fifa or need for speed. but the price is like 300 dollars.
they should just have a new revision every two or three years. with only expandable music DLC out on xboxlive every week.
It’s all of these reasons… not just one single one. Some apply to certain people and some to others. Personally, it pisses me off how over and over and over again, video game developers try and be innovative.. so much that they move away from the roots of the game which made it so good to begin with. It’s patheticly stupid. Guitar Hero is Guitar Hero, and the difficulty of the songs especially, also incombination with songs that might not be popular to the common wealth, but SOUND GOOD, is what created the popularity of the game. That’s why Guitar Hero 3 was superior to guitar hero 2, to guitar hero 1 – nearly every song past the first set had decent solos, sounded good, and the level of difficulty just kept rising. Then they release this WT shit and they call it Guitar Hero even though it no longer revolves around the guitar. I myself currently am in business management at the top university in Canada, and even i realize you can’t just look at an industry from the generalized business perspective and all it’s (sometimes bullshit) terminology, you have to look at the real world and PEOPLE at an indepth level, especially in the gaming industry.