If you bought Guitar Hero Live in the US, you might get a refund

While this may not matter much to us here on the southern tip of Africa, this is still an interesting and kind of sad story about how the mighty have fallen. Guitar Hero Live was Activision’s Hail Mary to see if they can revive the once extremely profitable franchise. With its six-buttoned plastic guitar and live service method of song delivery in the form of GHTV, it was a decent attempt to revive the rhythm genre. However, audiences didn’t latch on at all and rather than embrace the new game, most of the hardcore fans moved to Clone Hero and the rest of us forgot about it.

Activision shut down GHTV back in December which dramatically reduced the available songs for the game, making it only really worth it for the mediocre single-player setlist that they had. Now it seems that they’re just going to give people their money back for buying the game. If you’re in the US, you can sign up for a refund using this claim form and you need to have a few prerequisites before you can get your money back. You need to have bought the game between December 1st 2017 and January 1st 2019, have the receipts or credit card statement and sign a bunch of legal mumbo jumbo. This is all because of GHTV’s closure since a huge feature of the game was made indefinitely obsolete and the game that you bought doesn’t really function as originally intended.

It’s crazy to me that you can just get your money back if you bought the game, but that’s the risk you take when doing these perpetually online games that rely on servers and human input to deliver songs to near nobody because people didn’t latch on to the game. It also makes me sad because Guitar Hero Live was quite fun and had a lot of potential, but Activision’s aggressive pushing and weird monetisation models killed the franchise yet again. Good going, Activision.