[QUOTE="BoloTheGreat"]Even before this flurry of ____Hero games anylists had aldready been commenting on the over saturation in the music game market, now that activision has announced 3 new games (Van Halen, MJ and DJ Hero [urrgg..]) all of them at the £40 price point and above with DJ hero coming in at a heafty £108. This means we will have had by my last count at least over 10 (please feel free to correct me with exact number, it's hard to count) ___Hero games in the space of 4 years. Thats more than one every six months. Infact it's 12 actording to wikipedia although im not sure if that includes MJ and pearl jam.
All this adds up to one big fact; they are going to cause the series to collapse and burn out. There is only so many ____Hero games people are willing to buy before they get confused as to what is a good quality itteration. people will get so tired of seeing a new GH game every few months that they will just stick to what they know; their previous version.
Quite honestly I don't see the market for a £108 DJ hero, that's more than the Wii fit! And i don't see them being able to keep the GH brnad reputable for much longer, the game could have tured into a staple of gaming with a good quality GH game with new features and innovations coming everyc ouple of years, instead the real innovation moved out (Harmonix) and the re-hash bregade has moved in with glee. This will shorten the life and stunt the sales of the GH line and may well end in a 1983 stlye collpase of the music game market.
There is only so much **** you can shovel down someones throat before they throw it back up all over you and Activision will learn this the hard way; Hell they even attempted to make Tim Schafer TIM SCHAFER make a GH game and then sued hikm when he didn't.
Call of Duty is also losing all meaning of it's original name, I get that you can bring sports games out yearly with changing rosters and what not but big budget FPS games can't work that way sustainably. WaW was a total conversion mod, im sorry but it was just stupid in the way it was a re-skinned CoD4. This aprouch to FPS is tiring to many sections of your audience and wil again lead to decreased quality and consumer confusion. You can only ride the hype train for so long before you break it, or as yhatzee put it "sometimes you screw the pooch so hard it has to be locked in the bathrrom with a tube of soothing cream"
This is what activision will do, They have tuned CoD into "Activision's FPS money spinning Gimp". I have expeicence with companies meddling in peoples ****. EA did it for years, most notably killing off WestWood (i will NEVER forgive them for that) and turing it into its generic TRS making division, haing all the talent leave, with CnC generals having as much resemblence to the original as a pink cactus. No Kane? NO GAME!
Pricing is also an issue, £55?! £55?!!!?!!! Are you ****ing kidding me! I could get the top 4 selling blu-ray's for less than that (one of them being the Band of brother box set)! i know they think they can milk us but honestly you just start eating into you sales with a YEARLY game at £55. Do you expect people to drop that EVERY year? Also PC pricing has gone sky high, with $60 for the PC version in the US. We shall see how this panns out but i think they will get laughed out of the bulding buy PC gamers since anyone with an internet connection can get it free of charge.
This is also present in their stratergy towards DLC, they have alreaft annoced new map packs for MW2 leading to the depressing conclusion they are bing worked on in conjunction and just not being put on this disk Ubisoft stlye.
In short; Activision is taking us rougly from behind but they may well pay for it in the long run.
This is the smartest post I have read in my time here in SW. I agree with literally everything you say. Guitar Hero 1 was groundbreaking, Guitar Hero 2 was equally as fun. After GH2 RedOctane was purchased by Activision and thats when it started to go downhill. Same goes for COD. Call of Duty 1-3 were fantastic but once Activision saw the success of Call of Duty 4, they knew they had a winner and now every new COD is basically like you said a total conversion mod of COD4. Tim Schafer is a hero to gamers after what he did to Activision when they tried to turn Brutal Legend into a Guitar Hero sequel. He showed them he is not going to take their crap. I actually used to be a fan of Activision, but after they became Activision Blizzard I havent been able to stand them. Bobby Kotick should be ashamed of himself after what he has done. He has driven himself into a hole SO deep that he must be in China by now. When he said he isnt interested in games that cant be expoited each year, I knew he was eventually going to have a wake up call. Because of his philosophy on games, Activision has let so many good games go, Riddick was decent, Ghostbusters was REALLY funny and Brutal Legend was an absolute hit at E3 and is being touted as a possible GOTY contender to be up their with the likes of Uncharted 2, Forza 3 etc. SW could use more threads like this, its very informative and true. 
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