10 Times Video Games Found A Way To Be Even Worse

It's simply impossible to deny the success of the Guitar Hero franchise, which in its earlier years was a genuine breath of fresh air in the gaming market.

But like so many hit franchises, the rhythm game series suffered from its own popularity, as Activision oversaturated the market with increasingly less-interesting titles.

In 2009, six separate Guitar Hero games - largely spin-offs and band-centric titles - were released, and so when the sixth mainline game, Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, came out the very next year, it largely fell upon deaf ears.

Warriors of Rock wasn't awful by any means, but it was painfully unambitious and touted by far the weakest tracklist of any of the main games. It felt like Guitar Hero running on fumes, basically, and consequently cratered commercially.

The game's failure at market put the series on ice until 2015, when Activision attempted to relaunch it with Guitar Hero Live.

But rather than simply focus on assembling an awesome tracklist and making people remember all the fun they had playing the earlier games, Live lost itself down the microtransaction rabbit-hole.

One of Live's chief complaints was the lackluster on-disc tracklist, and though the GHTV Mode allowed players to stream a massive rotation of songs, you needed to unlock Play Tokens to pick specific songs.

And surprise, surprise, this was geared entirely around convincing players to spend real-world money on tokens, rather than grinding away on the random rotation in order to amass the tokens the hard way.

Though the basic bones of Guitar Hero Live had a ton of promise, Activision's wanton greed didn't do it any favours in the sales department. After flopping commercially, the community quickly died off, and the series hasn't been heard from since.