Does Bike Hero Have a Flat Tire?

It’s been live for three days and has amassed nearly a million views at the time that I sit and write this (by the time this posts, it could be well over a million), but Bike Hero isn’t going to save the Guitar Hero franchise.

Oh, it’s thoroughly entertaining. That’s not the problem. Here, check it out:

Guitar Hero: World Tour is not flying off shelves the way last year’s edition of the game did – or any of the iterations before it. The game’s release didn’t crack the top ten in October’s industry sales numbers, and its racing to play catch-up to its upstart music game competitor, Rock Band 2.

Low sales is problem that Bike Hero isn’t fixing (and Bike Hero is a viral ad put out on the Web by Activision, not just a bunch of kids with too much free time, so it’s being circulated to address a problem) – the brand is already popular enough that it has its own episode of South Park, after all.

I’m amused by the effort, but there’s nothing in this video that makes me feel like I need to run out and have the product it’s pushing. More traditional Internet marketing isn’t as buzzworthy, but it generates qualified, measurable results.