Activision CEO Bobby Kotick has said Guitar Hero’s plummeting sales and ultimate hiatus were brought about by the company’s neglect.

Speaking in an interview with Forbes, Kotick said that in focusing on “passion project” DJ Hero, “I think we abandoned a bit of the innovation that was required in the Guitar Hero franchise.”

“We didn’t really take the time that we usually take to understand audience behavior,” explained Kotick. “It was one of those things where we were resting on the idea that one of the essential fantasies of video games is to unleash your inner rock star.”

“And in hindsight, if you step back –and it really would have been a simple thing to do– we should have said, ‘Well, how many people really want to unleash their inner DJ?’ And then out of the people who do want to unleash their inner DJ, how many want to do it in the context of a game where you earn points, versus just taking a DJ deck or tools on their Macintosh and actually being a DJ? And it turns out it’s a very small market.

“But we created this critically acclaimed, highly rated game – and these are the hardest failures, when you put your heart and soul into it and you deliver an extraordinarily well received game, and nobody shows up to buy it.”

Kotick went on to explain that DJ Hero’s poor market performance coupled with the decline of the innovation-starved Guitar Hero franchise came as a “doubly whammy” of failure.

“So we made what I think was exactly the right decision last year,” he continued. “We said you know what, we need to regain our audience interest, and we really need to deliver inspired innovation. So we’re going to take the products out of the market, and we’re not going to tell anybody what we’re doing for awhile, but we’re going to stop selling Guitar Hero altogether.”

In the meantime, Kotick says that an anonymous studio is currently exploring "technology pathways" and building "a variety of different prototypes" for the next iteration of Guitar Hero.