Is This the Last Guitar Hero?

As great as the new Guitar Hero is; it is far from perfect, according to critics. The upcoming Rock Band will offer a ton of features besides just instruments beyond the guitar. Activision has been having quite a run,

" The latest from the NPD group shows that sales of Activision's titles, led by the Guitar Hero series, has hit almost $400 million. EA has lost the top spot for the first time in over a decade with sales of $365.7 million."Destructiod

This is all pre-Rock Band and Skate came out to good sales and good critical review but it has had a very short time to build steam. Most games of this type including Tony Hawk, are usually "long game" titles that make more money as time goes on. Even more when they reach the discounted price point. When RedOctane was rocking the Guitar Hero, the price point never went down; which is probably why Activision bought them in the first place.

Guitar Hero 3 was all ready pretty far along when the deal went down between RedOctane and Activision. It is certainly understandable that there aren't too many improvements or advancements. However, with Rock Band coming out in about a month with some of the advancements that would have benefited Guitar Hero 3. There are certainly more songs on the way for Guitar Hero 3 but there are even more songs on the way for Rock Band. Even that won't help in the long term.

Guitar Hero 3 was Activision's coming out party, and it rocks. But if there aren't some big changes in the future this might be the swan song for the series. At one point if Harmonix and Redoctane were still together they would have a monopoly. Now that Harmonix is working for EA, and coming out in a month. With features that everyone was thinking about since Guitar Hero 2. It is hard to believe that Activision and Redoctane are going to be able to recover from this very easily.