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Guitar Hero Live is the 2015 reboot for the Guitar Hero series. It is developed by FreeStyleGames (of DJ Hero fame) and published by Activision.
 Guitar Hero Live has two main modes. Live (GHL), and TV (GHTV).
 GHL is the "Story Mode", although there is no story, just a bunch of sets where you play as the lead guitarist of a few fictional bands, as you play guitar, and cycle between looking at the crowd, the singer, the bassist, the drummer, and then back to the crowd again, as your band sings mostly to you, instead of the crowd.
 GHL is shot in the First Person view of the guitarist in live video. The point is to make you feel like you're a real rockstar playing with your friends in a band in front of a huge venue full of people cheering you on. The unfortunate truth is that because people have different tastes, this fails. For instance, I myself am partial to rock and metal, but the majority of the playlists/bands were pop, light-rock, country, and generally stuff that I did not like. I just felt awkward standing up on stage with a bunch of people i wouldn't like off-stage, and most likely didn't even like them on-stage, either.
 GHL has only around forty five songs that exist on-disc, and are available for play on-demand, meaning the player can, freely, choose to play them whenever they would like to do so, and does not require a connection to the internet in order to do so.
   Guitar Hero TV, on the other hand, is arguably the main game mode. GHTV is an Always-Online, Cloud-Based "Music TV Network" that hearkens back to the days of yore when MTV actually played music videos all day long, instead of bullshit reality tv shows, no I am not bitter stop bothering me. It has two "Channels" that play "shows" that are genres. As of writing this, Channel 1 is currently on "Rock Blast" with "GHTV Weekender" and "Metal Takes Control" following it, while Channel 2 is currently playing "Pop Hour" with "Indie Is Here" and another "Pop Hour" following it (Guess we can't get away from those show block monopolies even in fictional tv... *sigh*). You can view the schedule online from your browser at any time here: https://www.guitarhero.com/game/ghtv.
 The great thing about GHTV, and one of the redeeming factors, is that when you play a song, it lays the actual Music Video of the song behind it, which is a really nice touch. 
 Admittedly, although the tone of how I wrote for GHL seems to indicate that I disliked it, Guitar Hero TV is in reality far worse than GHL in some ways. Guitar Hero TV is riddled with microtransactions, fired from a fully semi-automatic microtransaction assault minigun.
  == Microtransaction Overview ==
 Lets break down how Activision and FreeStyleGames are trying to take your money. There are two currencies in this $99 title: Coins, and Hero Cash. Coins are earned by playing songs. You also get a daily play reward for your first song of the day, that gives you a decent chunk of coins. You get anywhere between 20-200 coins (that's about what I've seen, but i have yet to be able to pinpoint exactly what affects how many coins you get). Hero Cash is a funny-money currency purchased directly with actual money.
 What do you spend Hero Cash and Coins on, you ask? Songs. Except you cant buy songs directly anymore. You buy "Play Tokens" to play songs from the cloud. Each play costs one Play Token, obviously.
 You can buy HC in increments from 300 for $0.99, all the way up to 6,900 for $19.99. For the sake of math, lets round that up to 1$ and 20$. At the bottom end of the ratio, we have 3HC per cent, and at the higher end of the spectrum, we have 3.45HC per cent.
 You can purchase play packs at a standardized (the ratio does not change the more you purchase at a time) rate of 1 play for 45 hero cash (or, 13-15 cents). You can only start purchasing play packs with coins at the 3-pack for 1,800 coins (600 per song). This means that each coin is worth between 0.005-0.00575c
 The game awards status (leveling your account up) and coins whenever you finish a song. Thankfully, when you play a song by burning a play token, this is still true, so that makes each purchase marginally cheaper, though not by much. Because songs award between 20-200 coins (lets say an average of 120 coins per song), that means that you save an average of 0.6-0.7 cents per 13 cent purchase. This is a little less than just not having to pay tax on a purchase. (10x0.13 == 1.30, saving an average of 6-7 cents)
 Without purchasing plays with coins/HC, earning coins through playing can only be done by playing random songs in the channels. So, if you have no money (optionally: that you want to spend on playing songs), your only recourse is to get lucky and have a show you enjoy playing, get unlucky and play songs you don't enjoy playing, wait until a good show is on, or play the paltry, pathetic selection of songs that exist on-disc.
 When you log in, you get an average of about 1200 coins for the first song you play. This is worth about two song plays. If you log in every day of the week, and only want to play one day on the weekend, this could actually be decently sustainable for playing for 'free'. You play one song per day, and then spend your plays on the weekend. Not half-a-bad way to play, if you like that sort of thing.
 However, for someone who wishes to do more than that, you'll just need to grind songs. Speaking of grinding, what good is a game with grinding that doesn't have a currency sink?
 Oh yes, of course there would be a currency sink. How else would they part you from your wallet? There are things that you can purchase with coins that customize your gaming experience. Admittedly, most of these are optional, but of course the most expensive option is also the one that is required for you to obtain.
 First, lets start off with the completely optional purchases, Note Highways, and Player Cards. These are little things that customize the game for you, your player card shows your profile on it, and these can run you between 600 for the basic ones, and all the way up to 3,600 coins for the more premium ones.
 The highways are a lot cooler in my opinion, and can change how the track looks, and even what the notes look like. Basic ones come at 1,700 coins, while premium highways are going to run you 5,700 coins each.
 Next, and honestly more egregious than anything, are Star Power Packs (No, i will not call it 'Hero Power', you are a star, not a hero, for picking up a guitar). The classic star power ability doubled your current combo point multiplier. If you had none, it gave you a x2 modifier, and if you had x4, it bumped it all the way up to x8! Great!
 Not anymore. The 'base' power is a bomb that clears the highway of all of the current visible notes, and awards points as though you had hit them all perfectly. However, there are other star power abilities you can choose. These range from "Dial Down" which temporarily reduces your difficulty setting by one (expert > advanced, advanced > normal, etc), "Dial Up", which i have not unlocked yet, but i can only assume it temporarily raises the difficulty setting, though I'm not sure why anyone would want to do that over just playing the higher difficulty setting, and the "2x modifier", which of course is your classic star power ability.
 There are two problems with this, one worse than the other. The first is that these require you to level your account up in order to unlock. The other is that you need to purchase individual uses of these abilities. Individual. Uses. Not per song, per guitar-tilt. Per activation.
 You get five per pack (presumably, as the only one I've unlocked does so). I am unsure of the prices, which may vary, however the Dial Down ability grants 5 uses for 280 coins. This means that in order to continue using the star power abilities other than the shitty bomb ability the game comes with, you'll need to basically be spending all of your coins on star power packs.
 Considering that you only make at most around 200 coins per song, and most songs will contain between 3-5 star power activations, it is nearly impossible to keep up with how many abilities you'll have to have in your inventory.
 The thing that really sucks about this is that there are so many star power activations in the game, and, considering that they even split up the activations (meaning if you have two bars of star power, you'd have to spend one ability per bar, instead of the bar staying activated à la classic guitar hero). This is also compounded by the next coin sink, which increases how many star power sequences appear in a song.
 Speaking of the next coin sink, there are "Guitar Upgrades". I consider these an ABSOLUTE REQUIREMENT for anyone that is anything more than a casual player of the game. If you care about your score (and you should, considering i do believe that your placement in the 10 players you're scoring against when playing a song affects your coin-income, affecting how many songs you can play) at all, these are required. There are four upgrades, each having 3 levels that you can purchase:
 - How often star power sequences show up (total number of star power uses a song will get you, increasing your score)
- The base score each note gives you (THE MOST IMPORTANT UPGRADE)
- The maximum potential combo multiplier (THE SECOND MOST IMPORTANT UPGRADE)
- The combo multiplier builds faster
 The upgrades cost 6,000, 9,000, and 12,000 coins respectively, for a grand total of a hefty 81,000 coins total (or around 700-800 random song plays). For an excruciatingly long time, players will not be able to play at the maximum potential because the game locks out their score until they play a fuck ton of songs. And, for every song you play with coins, for every customization you purchase, for every star power pack you buy, you're pushing this back. I think that's the worst part about it, is that you have two features that ALONE suck up all your coins, fighting for your coins. And the Play Packs are sitting in the back just sucking up your wallet while everything else fights over your coins. 
 It is an extremely well crafted system to take your money, and Activision/FreeStyleGames have successfully sold us the jukebox while simultaneously still charging us for each play.