Activision has already made headlines earlier this week when they revealed that they were canning both the Guitar Hero and True Crime franchises in favor of deeper focus on the digital space and their main franchises. More details on the restructuring plans of the industry’s largest publisher have been steadily coming through the cracks since, again through earnings calls to investors. It looks like Guitar Hero won’t be the only music-rhythm game absent this year, as the company has sworn off the entire game genre for 2011, again citing a lack of consumer interest.
Activision also announced that they had no plans to release any skate-boarding titles this year either, due to the same reasons. The company’s most recent efforts in the genre were the newest, critically panned, entries in the Tony Hawk brand. Given the company’s one-game-a-year model for most of its core franchises, such a delay could mean the end of both genres in general. No word yet on the effects these business decisions will have or have had on the game franchises’ respective developers.
In other Activision news, a new studio devoted to the company’s most profitable series – Call of Duty – has been revealed. Beachhead Studios will now be responsible for new digital and online-only content for the franchise. Activision CEO Bobby Kotick announced the studio, and its initial plans that include a Battle.net style hub for the franchise, leading many to believe this to be the foundation of a subscription-based multiplayer platform. Also announced for Call of Duty is a new free-to-play stand-alone title meant for China, which will run off micro-transactions and be out sometime after this year.
It is good that they are laying off of putting out a new Guitar Hero and Tony Hawk game every year, but they still need to cut back on the amount of CoD games they bring out in a year. I have stopped buying CoD games because they don’t innovate enough between games and the SP mode gets shorter and shorter every time.
I know Activision likes lots of money and they are getting that with the CoD franchise, but it was exactly the same with the Guitar Hero and Tony Hawk franchises years ago. Activision really needs to put CoD on the back burner for at least a year and promote new IPs over the existing ones they have been exhausting every year.
So besides Blizzard and COD… what does Activision have?