Expect new Guitar Hero releases for the next ten years

According to Jesse Divnich, an analyst at Electronic Entertainment Design and Research, lackluster sales of Guitar Hero: World Tour indicate that Activision's franchise has reached its half-life.

According to Divnich:

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.

Thank god. There is no need for yearly (or oftener!) Rock Band or Guitar Hero releases... at least on store shelves. That's not to say we shouldn't welcome more tracks, or arenas, or models: the games just have more merit as relatively static and, unchanging platforms delivering fresh musical gaming content via an iTunes-like delivery model.

In other words, let's stop shipping confusing new versions of these games and make the controllers the platform, delivering and updating content entirely over the Internet through a combination of free patches and micro-transactions. A sea of different Guitar Hero and Rock Band discs on the shelf just confuses matters. There's just no reason for them.

But then Divnich said this:

We expect Guitar Hero and Rock Band releases for the next 10 years as they will always have a large and loyal market base, just as [Dance Dance Revolution] is still today a very profitable franchise for Konami, even though that series reached its peak a long time ago.

So don't expect Guitar Hero or Rock Band to stop shipping discs anytime soon.

Guitar Hero "Reaching its Peak" [Edge]