Activision Cancels Yet Another Popular Series

It was just recently announced that Activision Blizzard has decided to retire Guitar Hero and DJ Hero, which along with MTV Games disbanding Harmonix, thus ending the Rockband series, means that the music genre is now effectively dead. You can blame it all on the man in the picture, CEO Bobby Kotick, known by fans as the Joe Quesada of video games. Or alternatively, you could blame it on Activision's long-standing company policies. Or just maybe, you can blame it on yourselves.

When Guitar Hero was first created video game studio Harmonix (now the studio behind Rockband), nobody expected Guitar Hero to be the overwhelming success it became mostly because it was a game that required a peripheral, bumping the price up to around $100, far more money than most parents would pay for a single game. Through word of mouth, Guitar Hero became a cult hit and made enough money to warrant a sequel, Guitar Hero II. The sequel was really the game that exploded the genre. With GH2's success, Activision took a move only Activision could possibly think of and officially declared Harmonix no longer part of Activision and decided to develop the franchise in-house. While Activision then took steps to churn out as many versions of Guitar Hero as possible, similar to their strategy with every successful franchise Activision has ever had, Harmonix was then bought out by MTV Games who proceeded to make the Rockband series.

Activision has quite the interesting past to say the least. You may not know this, but Activision is actually the oldest 3rd party video game company in the USA, originally created by a group of programmers who left Atari when it was purchased by Warner Communications. The programmers who left Atari were basically responsible for every major hit that Atari developed in-house, including titles like Centipede and Asteroids. In essence, Activision was the true Atari, developing hit games after the split like Pitfall!

Needless to say, Activision has become a shell of its former self, abiding by a company policy of churning out as many iterations of a franchise as possible, regardless of quality. This has led to franchises being developed simultaneously by 2 different studios in the case of Call of Duty, and franchises dying under the weight of how many different versions were developed. Activision has also grabbed developers and tossed them as quickly as possible, leading to sequels featuring drastically different gameplay and quality, most notably in the case of Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2: Enter Electro, the first being developed by Neversoft and the second being developed by Vicarious Visions. Who the hell makes a Spider-Man game where you have to constantly run on the ground and have little to no web-slinging?

Activision and Blizzard recently merged together, becoming the largest 3rd party company in the world. Along with the news that Guitar Hero will end, another idiotic announcement came, no new Blizzard games would come out in 2011.

Here's to hoping Activision chokes under their own ego.