Kotick wants to sell fucking cutscenes

[desocupado]

Terrible idea, methinks -- It would never sell. As odd as it may sound, people are willing to buy interactive movies like Heavy Rain, Metal Gear, Final Fantasy, etc... largely because they have 'some' interactive elements and still remain video games. The moment that they remove the interactive elements completely, it ceases to be an interactive movie, and becomes just a regular movie. And when you get critics like Ebert reviewing this stuff, they're gonna get ripped to shreds.

Interactive movies often succeed because they manage to avoid comparisons to real film. This stuff won't have that luxury.

Thats a valid and good point, movie critics are generally speaking much better than their counter parts in games to make out what is good and what is not. You never see any (serious) movie critics go "omg best movie evar" at some random summer block buster, but instead reserve such praise for movies that are actually genuinely good. Of course even with out the 10/10 best game evar reviews the hype machine itself and marketing might actually sell it. Though we shall see.

You guys forget the marketing, and the target audience. Those days, you can shit in a box, and people will buy it.

 

[Archibald]

Who cares that film reviewers will bash that shit. Film viewers aren`t target audience anyway.

 

[anus_pounder]

This far with not one kotick image?

 

[Volrath]

Pfft. All the SC2 cutscenes are already available on the Making-Of Disc, which can be easily removed from inventory.

They're also shit.

 

[kingcomrade]

They would have to get much better writers to make it not suck like SC2 did.

 

[DriacKin]

Who cares that film reviewers will bash that shit. Film viewers aren`t target audience anyway.

Bullshits.
There's plenty of video game films that get released every year and none of them manage to make tons of money. Even something as hyped and marketed as the new Prince of Persia film struggled to recover its production/marketing costs. And until the public perception of video game films changes, they will never be financially successful.

 

[Topher]

Did everybody forget about the cinematic pack Blizzard released after Diablo 2?

 

[DragoFireheart]

This far with not one kotick image?

 

[Lyric Suite]

SC2's in engine stuff was pretty fantastic, more exciting than the CG actually (which was crap and not at all in the same leage as War III)

It was fantastic in so as in-engine cinematic go, but they still felt like a ghetto replacement of real CGI cinematics.

 

[DraQ]

This far with not one kotick image?

What about images of both of his aspects?

Cocktick

 

[I.C. Wiener]

If it were any other company I wouldn't give a shit. There is nothing wrong with taking advantage of suckers and the sooner good developers learn that the sooner they'll stop going bankrupt. A healthy company will produce ~50/'50 quality game/popameauxle garbage and DLC/other forms of ripping stupid people the fuck off.

Troika might be alive today if they learned to play the DLC/preorder/subscription bullshit nickel and dime game. Or probably not, but I still wonder.

 

[zeitgeist]

I especially love the "hey, we have their credit card info already, might as well charge them for something" part. The e-store model that primarily relies on social networking and impulse purchases has proven to be frighteningly successful - bring enough people into a service that somehow connects them together socially, and requires them to enter their credit card details for some initial purchase or verification, make the purchases easy to make, and sooner or later it will become completely unimportant what exactly it is that you're selling, or how good it is.

 

[Furious Flaming Faggot]

They may have lived, but at what cost? To abandon one's principles is to give in to the popamole.

 

[Hoodoo]

youtube gg

 

[Metro]

You know I was going to say no one is stupid enough to pay $20-$30 for a game's cut scenes but then I remembered the target audience for this paid $10 for in-game pets and $25 for a horse in WoW.

 

[BearBomber]

I like that idea. Every retard who agrees to buy shit like this deserves to be strip of his money.

 

[Archibald]

Who cares that film reviewers will bash that shit. Film viewers aren`t target audience anyway.

Bullshits.
There's plenty of video game films that get released every year and none of them manage to make tons of money. Even something as hyped and marketed as the new Prince of Persia film struggled to recover its production/marketing costs. And until the public perception of video game films changes, they will never be financially successful.

No. He`s talking about different marketing model. They`ll offer it directly to those who already bought SC2, or their newest kewl game.

 

[Fowyr]

Curiouser and curiouser

 

[DraQ]

It's retarded, but not really rage inducing. Now imagine selling your game without cutscenes, but adding them as DLCs.


...
And?

 

[Angthoron]

Why does everything games-related I wished for once turn out perverted and retarded once it actually appears?

 

[Red Russian]

Interesting.

Look I'm sure Kotick ain't stupid and would probably have had some market research done which gave him results to speculate that this might work. The results of the research from his marketing team was probably "Sheeple". So that explains that.

But I can't help feel that he might have seen something at the Machinima website. Not saying it's blockbuster material or anything it's just that there's a lot of shit there and people regularly watch it. So I'm guessing that he's probably thinking that if an "Official Machinima Movie from Activision, the publishers of Call of Duty" were to come out he'd probably sell a lot of it. A hellavu lot!

Even though the entire collection of shit and some rare good-ones were to keep being pumped out in the face of this "Official Machinima Movie" he'd still win since Sheeple + Credit Card + "Official Machinima Movie from Activision, the publisher of Call of Duty" = Sales regardless of the counter "Free Machinima" onslaught.

I don't really watch it, so my comment on most of it being shit might be somewhat off, but I do know a lot of people watch it.


tl;dr - "Hi! I'm Kotick and I'm selling Machinima!"


Fake Edit turned into an Actual Edit: I get the feeling every time I want to post "Machinima" it sounds like Anime.

 

[BearBomber]

Look I'm sure Kotick ain't stupid and would probably have had some market research done which gave him results to speculate that this might work. The results of the research from his marketing team was probably "Sheeple". So that explains that.

Kotick didn't need to do any research. After selling that retarded horse he knows that his clients will buy any shit he will sell them regardless of quality.

 

[Ermm]

Kotick looks like one of those generic greedy CEO's from some 90s comedies.

 

[zeitgeist]

Look I'm sure Kotick ain't stupid and would probably have had some market research done which gave him results to speculate that this might work. The results of the research from his marketing team was probably "Sheeple". So that explains that.

Kotick didn't need to do any research. After selling that retarded horse he knows that his clients will buy any shit he will sell them regardless of quality.

What matters most here is probably that the buyers can show other people they're socially networked with online that they bought it. I imagine this will be sold either when Blizzard completely integrates WoW and Battle.net into one huge social networking/content delivery (e-store) service, which already seems to have happened to a large extent. That way, they can do things like giving you a WoW cosmetic item or a mount when you purchase the $30 cutscene movie, or have you collect the entire season of $15 cutscene episodes for an entire WoW armor set.

They can even offer in-game and achievement "rewards" for machinima creators, and sell the content they make later, all under the guise of community building, looking for new talents and so on. They can literally get someone to make them a hour and a half worth of content for free (for a WoW pirate hat or somesuch), sell it to millions of people for $30, and have the creator be immensely proud that they were chosen for such an incredible honor, recruiting more and more content creators in the process.

 

[Achilles]

Kotick looks like one of those generic greedy CEO's from some 90s comedies.

Actually he reminds me of "that 80s guy" from Futurama.