Guitar Hero Live

» see guitarhero.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

On 30 November 2018 Guitar Hero Live had 484 songs in it. Two days later it had 42. Nothing was deleted from anyone's console and no disc stopped spinning. Activision turned off GHTV, the streaming half of the game, and what remained was the handful of tracks that had been pressed into the plastic back in 2015.

The game had come out on 20 October 2015, built by FreeStyleGames in Leamington Spa after Activision let the series sit dormant for five years. It was a real redesign and not a sequel. The controller had six buttons in two rows of three instead of the five-in-a-line layout people had spent a decade building calluses on, and the audience in front of you was live-action video that curdled into open contempt when you dropped a note. Career mode filmed you from where a drummer would be standing. Reviews were decent. Sales were not, and by the February 2016 earnings call Activision was saying so out loud.

GHTV was the better idea and the one that killed it. Rather than buying songs you tuned into a channel already in progress, the note highway laid over the original music video, the way you pick up a radio station mid-chorus. Play tokens bought you one song on demand when you wanted something specific. Activision kept feeding the thing until the catalog crossed 484 tracks. In Turkey none of this was ever in the room. Console peripherals were import-priced here and the plastic instrument years were something you read about in preview coverage, not something that took up a corner of a friend's living room.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the second screen ~

The economics were the point and the trap. A rotating channel meant Activision never had to convince you to buy a song, only to keep you watching, and the licensing could be renewed rather than bought outright. It also meant somebody had to pay for video encoding and delivery every single day for a game whose install base had stopped growing in early 2016.

About fifty people were laid off at FreeStyleGames in March 2016. In January 2017 Activision sold the whole studio to Ubisoft, where it was renamed Ubisoft Leamington. In-game purchases stopped on 1 June 2018, the same day the iOS version and its companion app came off the App Store. The GHTV servers ran on for another six months after that with nothing left to sell.

~ what got buried with it ~

Everything that made Guitar Hero Live worth owning was on somebody else's server, which is a thing you only notice on the day the server stops answering. The disc was the smaller half of the purchase and nobody selling it had put that on the box.

Activision had no plans for another Guitar Hero and has not made one since. The genre it revived in 2005 and exhausted by 2010 got one last serious attempt, and the attempt was a subscription wearing a disc's clothes.

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