During the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Media, Communications & Entertainment Conference in California, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick said that the company will likely begin selling in-game cutscenes as full movies sometime in the next five years.
Kotick used StarCraft II as an example, saying that the high-quality in-game cinematics could be complied together into one film and distributed to fans digitally.
But the big question is this: would gamers actually buy the movie? After all, they will have already seen a fragmented version by playing through the single-player campaign. However Kotick indicates that such a release would be successful enough to topple any opening weekend box office record thanks to Activision-Blizzard's business model.
"My guess is--unlike film studios that are really stuck with a model that goes through theatrical distribution and takes a significant 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," he said.
Kotick added that Activision-Blizzard may attempt a movie release using a partner or directly from the publisher itself. "There will be a time where we'll capitalize on the relationship we have with our audience; deliver them something that is really extraordinary and let them consume it directly through us instead of theatrical distribution," he added. "If we were to deliver a film digitally this way, I'd say an extremely high percentage would then go to the theater and watch it again."
Activision-Blizzard may need to consider adding extra content not seen in the game in order to convince gamers to pay an additional $20 to $30.
