Surprise suprise, Activision (Kotick) wants to "sell" cutscenes.

I lol'd so hard.

The Escapist : Forums : The News Room : Kotick Itching to Sell Cutscenes As Films

 

It's like they are trying their hardest to kill gaming.

 

or promote piracy.

There are things such as youtube you know...

 

As one Escapist forum user puts it:

"And as you stated you could just watch the cutscenes on Youtube but then again Ýoutube could get a scary mail from Activision lawyer and would be forced to take em down."

 

Doesn't necessarily have to be youtube. Good luck to them trying to find every video uploading/sharing site out there.

 

Isn't this news article a bit old? For some reason I read something about this last week and from another source.

 

he should join forces with uwe boll, i think they'd make a great team!

u know, i have a sneaky suspicion that this guy may single handedly take down WoW from the throne if they're not careful.

its one thing to make a movie out of a game, but its another to charge money for cutscenes of a game... that's just plain theft.

 

As much as the new CoD: Black Ops interests me, I know what will happen once I purchase it for $60. Forget the nickel and dime, Kotick wants to $15 us to death. I honestly hope that gamers will catch onto this and give this business model a quick death (it's already lived on much longer than it should've)

Don't buy Activision games, it's our only hope at keeping games under $100+ each.

 

Uh, erm, ummm... lolwut?

That's like charging people to see the timeclock, score and stats of a sporting event on TV. I mean really, it's extra that isn't required...

I really hope he does this, and soon, so we can see him while he sits there expecting his money counter to start rolling, it just ticks a few and then crashes. That is the most stupid thing I have ever heard of.

 

This is pretty much the perfect model of how not to sell a product nor retain customers.

 

I won't buy any more Call of Duty games as long as activision owns the brand.

Brand = dead.

 

Well, when the games suck and do not deserve hard earned money...charge for something else too. Yup, good plan.

Not.

 

This guy is a bozo. But it really is a money maker. Charge the same for a game without cinematics, and sell some stupid 3d movie for more than the price of a DVD to all the fools willing to pay for it. It would be quite profitable. If a game sells a million titles, expect 100,000 fools to pony up, at least. And for every one of those sales there is no middle man, so more profitable. Either way they are getting more money for doing the same amount of work. Soon they will have single player and multiplayer sold separately, each for $40...

The brand died to me the day MW2 was released.

 

you caught on faster than i did.

 

can one still purchase Blizzard games while swearing off Activision? I still really want to get Diablo III

 

if singleplayer and multiplayer get sold separately, expect the singleplayer to be pirated to hell. I wouldn't even buy the game if that was the case.

 

or to get fixes ala sc2 lan fix


anyway we also got a P2P fix for corporation stupiditie

but damn how can such guys reaches any kind of post in an organisation

 

Its always been owned by activision...... Just saying.

 

I am confused. To me the article sounds like he just wants to package the cutscenes as one continuous movie, not exclude them from the game so you have to buy them to get the story elements of said game. Maybe I am wrong but obviously withholding cutscenes from a game is a ridiculous idea.

 

yes the cutscenes aren't to be withheld from the game, just 'made' into a movie and sold aswell as the game.

why anybody would want them after seeing them in the game before i do not know, but don't expect to see anymore 'Watch Cutscene' menus in Activision games again after this

 

Well it sounds like an interesting experiment but I agree, not sure who would want to spend more money on a movie of game cutscenes, when you already played the game and watched the cutscenes.

The problem with the games industry compared to music/movies is that game sales just keep going up. So you have these bean counters like Kotick who just figure they can cash in on every piece of the product instead of just offering a full package with some incentives, like movies and to a lesser degree music.

I mean movie publishers want to give you Blu-Ray/DVD combo packs with hours of special features, coupons and day zero sale pricing. You don't hear about them coming up with some ludicrous scheme to sell you the BD and then charge you another $10 for an alternate ending?

This trend will only continue as long as games keep selling like hotcakes. Which is why I am a cheapa55 gamer.

 

That's really dumb if they put the cutscenes in the game, then charge you to watch them afterwards. Unless it's really good Pr0n.

 

lolsome.

but as was mentioned previously in the thread i think, there will always be people with money to burn and stuff like cutscene movies to spend it on

 

There will always be idiots, yeah. Falling for people, like Kotick's, dirty tricks.

 

This is just ridiculous.

I don't care about the storyline of most video games, though...so this doesn't really affect me as a player, although it does significantly influence me as a consumer...

 

All your money are belong to Kotick!

 

Disregard this.

Will no longer make sense (change of avatar and user title).

 

I think FFXII did this long time ago, packaging cut-scenes into a movie, but at least the cut-scenes are really so long that it could actually be chained into a movie.

 

I think you guys missed the gist of it. He's not selling cutscenes separate from games, per se--he's selling the game, and then he's taking the cutscenes and selling them again.

You know, like blizzard had been quietly doing before Kotick went and shot his mouth off. Amazon.com: StarCraft Widescreen DVD Movie Special Limited Edition: Blizzard Entertainment: Movies & TV

It's not as far-fetched a concept as you think. The cutscenes don't take any extra money to produce, so every time they release this all they have to do is recoup the packaging fee--what, a box and a DVD? That's chump change, and there ARE buyers a-plenty as you can see by the reviews.

And if delivered electronically...my god. Nothing but profits.
You gotta stop thinking like an elitist gamer for a second and think like a businessman. When the effort spent is zero, any return is maximum--like dividing by zero almost. They get to sell the same product again, like used videogames, why WOULDN'T a smart businessman do that?

It's like running a 419 Nigerian scam. Amoral, and makes you baffled when people fall for it. But oh, do they fall for it.

 

So, in other words, Bobby Kotick = World-Class (Moron if that's filtered out)

 

Well, since when do gaming executives do anything that makes sense? They spend gazillions on DRM measures that are pretty much unsuccessful.

Reading the reviews, one user indicates they bought it for $0.01 + $3 shipping, probably what everyone else did. Might be worth it then. But a whole whopping 7 reviews over what three or four years? oooh. One from 2007, three from 2008, three from 2009, none from 2010.

Considering Starcraft is THE most successful game of all time, that's very sad. I'd hardly call that successful. Maybe made a whopping $100.

 

ha!

you fool

 

Yea it's really not that bad of a thing. Kotick's just got a bad rep, but selling cut scenes is old news.

 

Selling cut scenes I guess, if there are people dumb enough to buy them... I don't really get it since you can see entire games now on Youtube and sometimes on Giant Bomb. Start to finish with players narrating or just playing, including the cut scenes.

Hmm. Wonder when Activision will think. OMG if we make the awesome game ever, and not just another clone of our previous games over and over, maybe people will be willing to pay money for it! Especially if we make the campaign longer than 4 hours...

I think that's the hardest part for gamers right now, who wants to pay for something they already played?

When I first started gaming, games on those little diskettes game me 15-20 hours of fun for just $20.

 

Activision = everything that is bad in the gaming world. It truely is sad that you have to pay almost the same amount of money for a few maps as you did on the whole game and now selling cutscenes??? Whats going to happen? You play a game and the scene between a level will ask you for a CC or credits before you can watch it???

 

Kotick should sell SDKs to mod BlizzVision games too. He can force modders to charge for maps and mods after a review panel decides the mod has reached adequate quality - modders would have to pay for the review panel too. Then he can force modders to pay consulting fees for a BlizzVision project supervisor to oversee mod progress. If modders don't meet predefined milestones, they lose control of their mod and is handed over to Treyarch.

 

lol shadow ur really acting stupid for once.. really this kotick guy deserves to be shot and strung up... killing PC gaming... i wish there was a nazi or soviet governemnt now who would shoot him+ string him up for defrauding the people