No more heroes, indeed!

This is probably not news to anybody anymore, but Activision actually decided to finish off its Hero-franchises. No more Guitar Hero, no more DJ Hero, and my guess is no more Band Hero too, because frankly, who bought that? So, here I give you some personal thoughts about the whole thing:

To be very honest here, it does not hit me as a real surprise that major parts of the music game genre are gone now, with some minor exceptions. The reasons for that are numerous, but my guess is the decline in sale figures is one thing. Oversaturation of the market? Definitely another reason.

The interesting question to ask now is: What did we (the industry) learn?
Well, the best response to that is: To not milk a franchise until it is dead.
How do we do that?
By not producing several titles in the franchise per year!

See, there is something perplexing about this whole situation: Activision sees that the whole Hero-Series died, because they oversaturated the market. And I can see the business logic behind releasing a new game in the franchise every year, since doing that turned out to be more profitable for them then just releasing DLC. Sale figures were high for all platforms and everyone loved it. On the other hand, the 'Jekyll' part of Activision, Blizzard, does the exact opposite, or at least for the most part: They take some time to release new games in their franchises. StarCraft 2 and Diablo 3 came and come out many years later than their predecessors. They sell well and are actually able to keep up quality or at least a certain amount of innovation.

How does Activision react? By releasing more Call of Duty Games! Unfortunately, consumers will most likely support this kind of action, because let's be honest: Those are the same people that bought the Medal of Honor reboot and are going to buy the numerous Resident Evil games that Capcom will bring out in order to raise their profit.

The sad and exceedingly funny part is, that we then turn our head to a game like Enslaved or your favorite underselling Wii-title du jour and whine about how those games get ignored. There is an easy solution to the whole situation. It's the thing we did to bring Guitar Hero and Rock Band down (two things we should at least partially rejoice about!) and would be able to stop the onslaught of military shooters and shovel ware:

We stopped buying them.

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