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
Ten different bands represent the songs in the "Guitar Hero Live" mode, playing in two different music festivals. Members of these fictional bands were selected through auditions prior to filming, making sure that they could recreate the actual performance of a song, as well as mixing and matching members of ensemble groups to get the right look and feel. Bands were filmed in a warehouse in Oxford, England. To help with creating appropriate stage presence for the fictional bands and their fans, FreeStyleGames created material that each band would have had in the band's career, such as album covers and clothing, using various musical genres to help inspire their designs.