Guitar Hero 4 Will Feature a “New Hardware Innovation”

During Activision’s Q4 2008 Earnings Release conference call today, Activision Publishing’s President Mike Griffin hinted at a new Guitar Hero hardware innovation.

Griffin said that a holiday release of a Guitar Hero game will feature this hardware innovation and that Activision will be releasing more information regarding this hardware innovation in the next few weeks.

Activision was pretty mum about the details during the Question Period of the conference call, but said they were “excited” about the innovation and would clear up everything when the announcement was made in the upcoming weeks.

We suspect that Griffin was hinting at the same things that Activision CEO Bobby Kotick was hinting at during his interview with Conde Nast Portfolio Magazine when Kotick said “it’s not just about guitars. We’ll include a lot of other instruments, vocals.”

Griffin continued to announce that Activision will be putting more time into the downloadable content for the Guitar Hero series saying that they plan to release much more DLC’s for the franchise, likely over 3 times the what they have been releasing thus far.

3X seems also to be the magic multiplier with Guitar Hero as they also announced that they plan to release 3 times the number of Guitar Hero titles compared to the year before.

Mind you, Activision’s fiscal 2009 starts in June which sees the release of Guitar Hero: On Tour and Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. Adding one more title to that (Guitar Hero IV) would only be 3 games. As Activision released 2 Guitar Hero games during their fiscal 2008 (Guitar Hero Encore and Guitar Hero III), 3x that would be 6 Guitar Hero titles!

6 Guitar Hero titles in one year seems a bit excessive to us (but who are we kidding, we will likely get all of them)

Seeing as how Activision didn’t actually say what the ‘hardware innovation’ would be, do you think it will be a Rock Band copy, or do you think they will come up with something really innovative? Cowbell?

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