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Music

Game Over for Guitar Hero

It was only a few years ago that the Guitar Hero video game franchise was being hailed by many as the saviour to music industry woes, and the key to getting younger audiences interested in guitar-based music again. However, with the recently announced discontinuation of the series, it appears we were being overly optimistic.

So what went wrong so quickly? Well, in retrospect this wasn’t entirely surprising. The biggest problem was that other than adding new songs to the Guitar Hero catalogue, there weren’t many ways to make the game seem new. Once you master the basic skills, there’s just not that much difference between playing any of the editions. It may be a music-based game, but it’s still primarily a game, so simply adding more songs isn’t going to keep people interested if the game-play itself stays static.

The other big issue is that it’s more expensive than most games, since it depends on specific hardware. That wasn’t a problem when times were good, but in a recession consumers are going to think twice about throwing down a bunch of cash on a toy guitar. Besides, at this point pretty much everyone who cares already owns one, so sales of the hardware were bound to decline.

Finally, if you’ve been watching the pop charts lately you’ll notice that rock music isn’t particularly popular right now. In fact, finding any loud guitar albums on the Billboard charts is pretty rare these days, which isn’t something that a video game is going to change. No, if rock is going to get the kids excited again, it’s going to have to be because of exciting new music, not simply a clever repackaging of the classics.

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