The music genre of video games became a fad with the introduction of Guitar Hero in 2005. Despite the game’s early success, and the success of other games such as DJ Hero and the competing Rock Band franchise, Activision announced last week that Guitar Hero will no longer be produced.

Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg explained that the “demand for peripheral-based music games declined at a dramatic pace,” according to Joystiq.

“Given the considerable licensing and manufacturing costs associated with this genre,” Hirshberg said. “We simply cannot make these games profitably based on current economics and demand.”

The Guitar Hero game that was being developed for release this year will also be discontinued.

“Instead, what we’ll do is focus our time and energies on marketing and supporting our strong catalog of titles and downloadable content,” Hirshberg said. 

Andrew Davis, a junior in mechanical engineering, thinks that Activision made the right choice in discontinuing the franchise.

“I think it was a smart move for the company,” Davis said. “Because, if no one is buying the games anymore, then why should they spend money to produce the game?”

David Meyer, a freshman in First Year College, agreed that Activision made a smart move.

“It is better to quit while you are ahead then going bankrupt,” Meyer said.

One aspect of the series that could have possibly hurt sales is the annual introduction of pricey new controllers for the games. The guitars were over thirty-dollars, and combined with sixty dollars for the game, this factor alone deterred some consumers from purchasing it.

“All of the equipment and songs were too much money,” Meyer said. “Unless you were a diehard fan, you wouldn’t want to buy it all.” 

Bobby O’Brien, a freshman going undeclared, still uses a guitar from Guitar Hero 2, which was released in 2006.

 ”It’s pretty ‘old fashioned,’ but it works great,” said O’Brien. “So, I don’t really need to spend all that money on the new, fancy guitars.”

Joshua Helms, a freshman in paper science, said the decline of consumer purchasing caused the high prices for the downloadable songs and new guitars.

“When you lose money on a product, you raise the price of what comes with it,” Helms said. “That’s economics. If you can’t make a profit, there’s not much point in producing it.”

Guitar Hero can also get repetitive after a while for some consumers, and the addition of new songs may not be enough of an incentive to warrant another 60 dollar purchase.

“I think that since people already own older music games, they don’t really feel the need to get new ones. I’m fine with playing the songs I already have,” O’Brien said.

O’Brien isn’t really surprised that Guitar Hero is over. 

 ”It seems like [Activision] just ran out of ideas for new Guitar Hero games, and people are starting to get bored,” O’Brien said.

Meyer agreed that the games simply outlived their welcome.

“People didn’t want to pay for a new game when they already had one,” Meyer said.

Guitar Hero featured big-name bands in certain games to try and lure in consumers and get a fresh spin on an old series. Bands such as Aerosmith, Van Halen and Metallica were given their own games.

According to O’Brien, the problem with these games is focusing on a specific band limits the number of potential customers.

“There probably aren’t enough people who like Van Halen enough to buy the game,” O’Brien said. “The same can be said about those other bands [that were featured in a videogame].”

Rock Band, Guitar Hero’s biggest competitor, also followed with their release of band-specific games, such as Green Day and The Beatles.

Davis believes that these band-specific games only helped sales “for the customers that are big fans of those bands. The other customers may have no interest in it.”

Devin Worley, a freshman in computer engineering, is not sure if Rock Band will also be axed from production.

“But if it did, another company would just swoop in and create another game just like it,” Worley said.

Eventually, Helms believes that Rock Band will share the same fate as Guitar Hero.

Andrew Rindos, a junior in mechanical and computer engineering, purchased Guitar Hero and its competitor Rock Band when they were first released. Rindos believes that Rock Band will be able to live on for a few more years now that its main competition is no longer being produced.

“The games lost their luster rather quickly and made my fingers hurt,” Rindos said.

 The fad with music games, O’Brien thinks, is over.

“I think its popularity just ran its course,” said O’Brien. “People just aren’t as interested in buying Guitar Hero or Rock Band games as they were a few years ago.”

“The new ‘fad’ of video games is shooters,” said Davis, which is evident in the popularity of the Call of Duty series.

According to the Associated Press and the NPD Group, Guitar Hero sales reached $2.47 billion and Rock Band reached $1.28 billion, both in the United States as of the end of 2010. In comparison, Call of Duty: Black Ops, which was released in November, reached $1 billion internationally in six weeks.

Another issue that could be facing music games is the new gaming peripherals such as the Kinect and the Playstation Move.

“If the music industry is declining, it could be a result of gaming being refined to be played on things such as the Kinect,” said Worley. “All of the [rhythm-based] games are kind of repetitive so [that industry] might decline until the next big thing is introduced or invented. It creates a vicious cycle of video games that are currently hot on the market.”

The main factor in the demise of Guitar Hero is probably market saturation.

 ”Like all toys, there’s a popularity phase and then it goes away,” said Helms. “The generation that was centered around these games has either gone to college or is about to go to college, and many would rather save money than try to spend it on a game when someone you know probably has it.”