Video game giant Activision has made another statement concerning the Guitar Hero franchise, saying that "the brand won"t go away," even if the publisher is not planning a new title for the near future.
Speaking in an interview GamesIndustry.biz, Dan Winters, Vice President of Developer Relations commented, "Actually, just to clarify, we"re just putting Guitar Hero on hiatus, we"re not ending it. We"re releasing products out of the vault - we"ll continue to sustain the channel, the brand won"t go away. We"re just not making a new one for next year, that"s all."
Activision announced back in February that it was no longer planning to make any new music games, including Guitar Hero and DJ Hero after the genre began to see a decline in popularity. The publisher released the following statement on Guitar Hero:
"Due to continued declines in the music genre, the company will disband Activision Publishing"s Guitar Hero business unit and discontinue development on its Guitar Hero game for 2011."
Winters continued to say that the game could still be picked up by another publisher. "That would have been, and still might end up being, a very successful mid-tier opportunity for someone. But, as I said, we changed our business model to where we were going to change our business model to focus disproportionately on three big, huge monsters. Those three monsters are the Bungie, Call of Duty and Spyro titles."