Guitar Hero
In April 2015, Activision announced a new entry in the series, titled "Guitar Hero Live". The title was developed by Activision's internal studio FreeStyleGames, who previously had worked on the "DJ Hero" spinoff titles. FreeStyleGames were given free rein to reboot the "Guitar Hero" series for next-generation consoles. One of their first innovations was to drop the standard five-button guitar controller, ultimately designing a six-button guitar controller, with two rows of three buttons each, allowing them to mimic actual guitar fingering. "Guitar Hero Live" was released with both a career and an online mode. The career mode used full-motion video taken from the perspective of a lead guitarist underneath the note highway, to create an immersive experience to the player. The online mode, called "GHTV", discarded the previous downloadable content approach and used a music video channel approach to stream playable songs to players, adding new songs to the catalog on a weekly basis. The game was released in October 2015.
Guitar Hero Live
The task of developing the new game was given to FreeStyleGames around 2012. FreeStyleGames had developed both "DJ Hero" and "DJ Hero 2", and while both games were critically praised, the latter was released on the downward trend of the music game genre. FreeStyleGames had suffered some layoffs as a result of the hiatus of the "Guitar Hero" series, though remained an Activision studio and financially viable due to their work for the Wii U "Sing Party". As the development of "Sing Party" wrapped up, the studio created an internal research and development department to begin brainstorming what their next game would, with input from Activision. Hirshberg had encouraged the team to reconsider "Guitar Hero", noting the fan dedication to the series, but noted that the game needed innovation to be successful. Activision gave the team freedom to develop the game without relying on the previous titles in the series. The core gameplay of "Guitar Hero Live" was rebuilt from scratch; developer Jamie Jackson explained that the goal of the game was to bring "big innovation" to the franchise rather than continue with the same format used by previous games. He explained to his staff to only "think of "[Guitar Hero]" as a name. Think of it as a music game with a guitar peripheral, but pretend that nothing else has ever been done." The team brainstormed on what had made the "Guitar Hero" series fun, and recounted the earlier titles of the series which were designed to enable the player to envision themselves as a superstar guitarist, subsequent design choices were made around recreating that experience. The team also cited fellow Activison franchise "Call of Duty" as an influence towards the goal of providing an immersive, first-person experience.