Activision Considers Selling Video Game Cutscenes

If Activision stripped all of the cutscenes from StarCraft II, pasted them together into one big movie and charged between 20 to 30 dollars for you to buy it, would you pay? Activision’s Bobby Kotick thinks you would.

It’s an absolutely crazy idea. Take the cutscenes normally spread out over the course of an entire game like StarCraft II, yank them from the game, and package them as premium movie content for around half the price of the game itself. It one of the silliest ideas I’ve heard in quite a while, yet Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick delivered it with a straight face yesterday during the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Media, Communications & Entertainment Conference in California.

“If we were to take that hour, or hour and a half, and take it out of the game and we were to go to our audiences, who we have their credit card information a direct relationship, and say to them ‘Would you like to have the StarCraft movie?’

I’d like to believe Blizzard’s audience would collectively fall over laughing. That’s not what Kotick believes. He believes that a publisher-distributed StarCraft II movie of this sort would crush opening weekend box office records.

“My guess is unlike film studios that are really stuck with a model that goes through theatrical distribution and takes a signification amount of the profit away, if we were to go to an audience and say ‘We have this great hour and a half of linear video that we’d like to make available to you at a $20 or $30 price point,’ you’d have the biggest opening weekend of any film ever.”

Kotick went on to say that it’s likely the company would be offering this sort of cutscene movie sometime in the next five years.

In the course of writing up this story I’m pretty sure I’ve developed an uncontrollable facial tick. Is he serious, or perhaps a better question, is he right? Would you pay for a video game story without a video game?

Activision ‘Likely’ To Sell Game Cutscene Movies [IGN UK – Thanks nonentity!]