Gamasutra - News - Activision Boasts Guitar Hero's Music-Selling Power, Seven Studios On Franchise

news

features

Blogs

jobs/resumes

contractors

store

rss

twitter


	View All

	February 10, 2010

		Analysts: EA On The Right Track At Last

		GamesBeat@GDC Confirms OnLive, GameStop, PlayStation Home Speakers

		Ubisoft Q3 Sales Edge Down, As It Ramps Up Big Franchises


	View All

	February 10, 2010

		Television, Meet Games

		Two Halves, Together: Patrick Gilmore On Double Helix [1]

		The Road To Hell: The Creative Direction of Dante's Inferno [20]


	View All Post RSS

	February 10, 2010


		Lineage 2 Interview - 'Freya Update Is Just a Beginning' - Pt.2

		Fixing the GDC 2010 Schedule Builder [3]

		Swashbuckling for Landlubbers: Why you may already be encouraging piracy! [19]


	View All Post a Job RSS

	February 10, 2010

		THQ Animator - Motion Builder (contract)

		LucasArts Senior Systems Designer

		Trion Redwood City <b>Sr. Brand Manager</b>

		Telltale Games Game Designer

		Telltale Games Senior Software Engineer - Core Technology

		Airtight Games IT System Administrator

		Roblox Apple Game Engineer - Kids' Virtual World

		Roblox Senior Web Engineer (front-end)


		News Director: Leigh Alexander
		Features Director: Christian Nutt
		Editor At Large: Chris Remo
		Advertising: John 'Malik' Watson
		Recruitment/Education: Gina Gross

	Feature Submissions


	If you enjoy reading this site, you might also want to check out these Think Services sites: Game Career Guide (for student game developers.) Indie Games (for independent game players/developers.) Finger Gaming (news, reviews, and analysis on iPhone and iPod Touch games.) GamerBytes (for the latest console digital download news.) Worlds In Motion (discussing the business of online worlds.) Game Set Watch (the Group's alt.game weblog.)

Activision Boasts Guitar Hero's Music-Selling Power, Seven Studios On Franchise
by Chris Remo

1 comments

September 16, 2008

Activision Boasts Guitar Hero 's Music-Selling Power, Seven Studios On Franchise

Music featured in Guitar Hero games causes non-game sales of that music to see several-fold sales boosts, Activision and music label executives claimed during the company's Analyst Day event.

Universal Music Group president Zach Horowitz claims that Guitar Hero inclusion takes music sales two to three times higher, and in some cases the influence is much greater -- Weezer's "My Name is Jonas," originally from the group's 1994 debut album and featured in Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, saw a tenfold increase.

Activision CEO Bobby Kotick also claimed that the standalone title Guitar Hero: Aerosmith resulted in more revenue for the band than any individual Aerosmith album.

Along with those statistics, the company announced its plans to triple the amount of its total released Guitar Hero games and content by 2010.

Towards that end, the company revealed it has no fewer than seven studios working on the Guitar Hero franchise. Last week, B-Boy developer FreeStyleGames was acquired and will be providing localized content for the upcoming Guitar Hero: World Tour.

Much of that extra development bandwidth will be focused on ensuring plenty of localized European content will be available, an area in which Activision executives admit the franchise has been lacking. Despite the historically strong success of music games in Europe, the region has so far been underrepresented in terms of Guitar Hero revenue.

[Next News Story] [View All]

Comments

Steve Watkins

19 Sep 2008 at 5:32 pm PST

Well, come on Bobby... GH: Aerosmith has WAY more songs on it than the individual albums do - and you got to cherry pick the best. That's not a fair comparison. And Aerosmith established themselves over decades of hard work. YOU didn't make Aerosmith - they are making YOU. Your spin/hype gets so annoying.

As for all the extra development on GH ... Where can I get an autographed copy of your upcoming book "How to drive a Genre into the ground*" ?

* - Denotes SARCASM.