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 World Tour
According to the "Game Informer" preview, the addition of drum functionality came from work initially done towards the "Drum Hero" title. This work was later folded into the "Guitar Hero" series after Neversoft was chosen as developer of the series. Neversoft's Allen Flores stated that with the addition of the existing drum gameplay, the development of "World Tour" took under a year, starting development immediately after the release of "Guitar Hero III". The drum instrument controller was designed to be more realistic, with input from Chad Smith (of Red Hot Chili Peppers), Stewart Copeland (of The Police) and Travis Barker (of Blink-182), all of whom requested the elevated cymbal pads. The ability to open-strum the guitar was a feature that was planned for "Guitar Hero III" but was removed before release, finding that it was too difficult on the guitar tracks. However, they built this feature in from the start of "World Tour" development for the bass guitar tracks.