IGN is reporting that Activision has canceled the next game in the Guitar Hero franchise scheduled for release in 2011. In addition, the company has “disband[ed] Activision Publishing’s Guitar Hero business unit” due to declining sales in the music genre. Obviously this is big news for many reasons, but particularly significant since Guitar Hero was a franchise that netted the company over a billion dollars in recent years. The company left open the possibility for future Guitar Hero games, but probably not for some time.
They also announced that the next game in the True Crime series, True Crime: Hong Kong, would no longer be released. An Activision representative was quoted as saying that True Crime: Hong Kong had been canceled because it “just wasn’t going to be good enough.” No word on whether the respective development teams will be offered other positions in the company or laid of.
