going to use new studios and reinvent" the series, but a former teammember of Vicarious Visions stated that as of 2012, all development of Guitar Hero had come to an end within Activision. Another source close to Vicarious Visions had reported to Kotaku that while Guitar Hero 7 was in development under an Activision studio, the game was considered a "disaster". The cancelled game omitted the additional instruments and used only a guitar peripheral, redesigning the unit to include a 6-button mechanism replacing the strum bar; the resulting unit was considered too expensive to manufacture and purchase. The developers had also started the game development from scratch to try to create new characters and venues that would be more reactive to the actual songs being played to give the feel of a music video, but ultimately this proved too much of a challenge and had to be scrapped. Further, with a limited budget, the song selection was limited to "low-budget" hits of the 1990s, or at times reusing songs that had previously been included in Guitar Hero games. Though the team had a two-year development cycle, it was closed down after Activision president Eric Hirshber had seen the current state of the project at the one-year point. Another potential Guitar Hero project was discovered by the archival site Unseen64 for a game titled Hero World, a massively multiplayer online game that would link the Guitar Hero and DJ Hero games. The game had been developed by FreeStyleGames, sometime after the release of DJ Hero 2, with the main development duties passed to Virtual Fairground, using their platform The Ride, an Adobe Flash-based platform that would let the game be played in a web browser. The game was cancelled in 2011 along with other pending Guitar Hero projects. No further downloadable content for either Guitar Hero or DJ Hero was made after February 2011, though Activision committed to releasing content that was already in development by that time due to fan response; later, in a move described by Game Informer as "the final nail in [the series'] coffins", Activision announced it would discontinue all DLC sales for the series without revoking access to tracks already bought as of March 31, 2014. Though Activision had moved away from the Guitar Hero series, the lessons learned helped them and developer Toys for Bob to handle the manufacturing and outsourcing issues that came with