This year we won’t be getting any new Rock Band or Guitar Hero games for the first time since 2005. Guitar Hero was officially put on the back burner earlier this year. Rock Band isn’t necessarily dead, even if we aren’t getting a new game this year. The year (or perhaps more) off isn’t just time being used to think of the next instrument to introduce — future iterations of the series may end up being much different.
Sales of both Guitar Hero and Rock Band have declined in recent years. Many point to Activision flooding the market with Guitar Hero releases (each having a version packaged with a plastic guitar) as the cause of that. Harmonix CEO Alex Rigopulos told Giant Bomb that he thinks “there is probably some truth to that,” but it’s more complicated than a simple explanation like that suggests.
