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 soundtrack for the "GH Live" portion was also considered weak. McElroy found most of the songs were from 2000 or later, forgoing classic rock songs, and considered the soundtrack to be the "biggest disappointment" of "GH Live". Buttersworth stated that many of the on-disc selections are pop songs that "just aren't cut out for Guitar Hero gameplay", as they feature the same repeating guitar riff over and over. Griffin was more favorable of the on-disc set list, finding that the tracks represented "the music landscape as it is rather than as it was". Carter also appreciated the soundtrack, calling it a "good spread" of songs that can appeal to everyone.