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.
Ubisoft Leamington
The first game the company developed under Activision's ownership was "DJ Hero" (2009), a spin-off of the "Guitar Hero" series, in which players used a turntable-based controller to mimic the actions of a disc jockey across numerous songs. The title was considered successful, and they completed "DJ Hero 2" the following year, though around that time, the rhythm game genre was suffering from a glut of releases and was in decline, and Activision had decided to end further production of any "Guitar Hero" title. The company had to lay off some employees during this time, but still were financially viable with success of "Sing Party" (2012). As "Sing Party"s development was wrapping up, Activision approached FreeStyleGames to have them consider how to reboot the "Guitar Hero" franchise. FreeStyleGames developed a new guitar controller atypical of ones that has been created to that point, and crafted a different approach towards presenting the game to players through a first-person perspective full-motion video. This work culminated in "Guitar Hero Live" (2015), the first new "Guitar Hero" title for the eighth generation of video game consoles.