So this generation, Activision has becomed the biggest third-party publisher even more so than Electronic Arts. That's greatly attributed to the huge success of the Guitar Hero and Call of Duty games. Activision, last generation, was not considered a very good developer. They were more like THQ: a company most people didn't care about. However, I think that Activision's rise to success will be over as fast as it started.

Activision just announced 5 new Guitar Hero games to be released this year. I have the feeling that this isn't a smart business move in the long run. The popularity of Guitar Hero is strong now but so was that of Need for Speed last generation (Need for Speed Underground 2 nearly sold 10 mil games across all platforms). However, EA killed the franchise by making yearly iterations, let alone making multiple games in a single year.

Smart companies usually don't make more than 1-3 iterations of a single franchise during the course of a generation (Mario, Mario Kart, Gran Turismo, Halo, GTA). That's the reason why games of those franchises are still considered relatively fresh while new Sonic games aren't. The same could be said about Call of Duty even though Call of Duty will most likely take a longer time to decline than Guitar Hero.

So do you think Activision will cause it's own downfall or we will still be looking forward the new Guitar Hero games in 2-3 years from now?

I sure hope they will be taken down a peg or two. Their attitude sucks.

Ghostbusters!

call of duty will survive though

I sure hope they decline. They are ruining Call of duty with its yearly releases. If they fired Treyarch and put out an Infinity Ward CoD every other year then the series would do amazing!

Guitar Hero I already consider to be dying. World tour is doing far worse than GH3 if I'm correct. And now 5 titles this year?

Seems like they are turning into EA (EA acquired Westwood and destroyed the C&C series). As long as they don't push Blizzard around then hopefully they will remain better than EA. EA boycott till another General Chaos!

I agree unless Call of Duty doesn't evolve enough and another multiplatform FPS takes everything good about Call of Duty and makes it better.

Right now I'm not sure which one is worse, EA or Activision. EA is really getting the hang of making better games, but their DRM is often terrible. Activision on the other hand is even more greedy and the quality of games isn't that great in the end, but they don't seem to have much DRM. I suppose the most important thing is that I hate them both anyway.