Activision gave the team freedom to develop the game without relying on the previous titles in the series. McElroy acknowledged the presentation can potentially be "cringe-worthy", but felt that the video was put together with self-awareness of this factor to make it more charming, noting some of the extra details that FreeStyleGames and the actors used to fully take on their roles. The game was released for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Wii U, Xbox 360, and Xbox One in October 2015. It's actually real people in the crowd, backstage and playing in the band with you which makes it feel like your important and motivated to play well.

In an update in December 2015, players on GHTV had an opportunity to be randomly pitted in a head-to-head challenge against another player of similar skill level, about twice every half-hour.In the game's primary single-player mode, titled GH Live within the game, the player completes songs while experiencing full-motion video taken from the first-person perspective of a band's lead guitarist. Activision offered a contest for players to win prizes by participating in a special "Shred-a-Thon" premium show, highlighting the addition of DragonForce's " Through the Fire and Flames"—one of the most notoriously difficult songs that has appeared in other Guitar Hero titles—to the GHTV setlist. On 14 April 2015, Hirshberg and Jackson invited Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy and Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance to promote the game. Jackson explained that the feature and its curated playlists were "about discovering music as much as it is about going and finding music you know you already like".

Activision announced in June 2018 that the GHTV servers will be shut down on 1 December 2018, rendering this functionality unusable.They had to come up with something new, keeping it the same might have been too stale for newcomers. Green Day, The Killers, The Lumineers, My Chemical Romance, Pierce the Veil, The Rolling Stones, Skrillex, and The War on Drugs. It also removes the highway during parts of the song where you don't need to play so you can watch the video rather than twiddling your thumbs. Wentz performed his band's song "My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark" in the Guitar Hero Live mode, while Way and Jackson dueled each other on My Chemical Romance's song " Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)". Brandon Jones of GameTrailers believed it was difficult to "take the actors seriously" in part due to the duality of the crowd reaction as well as that the song was still based on studio recordings, sounding off in the concert setting.

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. To enable smoother transitions between positive and negative versions of the band footage, multiple takes were performed for each song using the same camera motions.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.