the highly successful Skylanders toy and video game franchise. Guitar Hero Live and second hiatus (2015–present) 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. Though the game was praised as a reinvention of the Guitar Hero series, the game did not sell as well as Activision expected; due to lowered forecasts, Activision let go of about half of FreeStyleGames' developers. In January 2017, Ubisoft acquired FreeStyleGames from Activision, with unclear consequences for the game. Activision shut down GHTV on December 1, 2018, reducing the available songs from almost 500 to the 42 present on-disc. In 2020 online servers for all Guitar Hero games were shut down on PS3. Between this and the closure of Wii online servers for all games, they are now only playable online on Xbox 360. Games Main titles The original Guitar Hero was released on the PlayStation 2 in November 2005. Guitar Hero is notable because it comes packaged with a controller peripheral modeled after a black Gibson SG guitar. Rather than a typical gamepad, this guitar controller is the primary input for the game. Playing the game with the guitar controller simulates playing an actual guitar, except it uses five colored "fret buttons" and a "strum bar" instead of frets and strings. The development of Guitar Hero was inspired by Konami's Guitar Freaks video game, which at the time, had not seen much exposure in the North American market; RedOctane, already selling guitar-shaped controllers for imported copies of GuitarFreaks, approached Harmonix about