Activision Blizzard Cutscenes: Would You Buy This?

[Altorin]

http://kotaku.com/5639929/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.

I wouldn't, not as long as gamers have good capture methods and a YouTube account.

I commented in the newsthread, but my answer is a resounding "oh hell no."

I can't see how ANYONE but Bobby Kotick could see that as a good idea. If you own the game, you already have the cutscenes. If you don't own it, then you clearly don't care enough to spend half the purchase price of the game on just the cutscenes.

MAYBE if they released it along side hours and hours of extra footage, like a 3-DVD pack with 10-12 hours of interviews with various designers, developers, prominent players etc, and a full in depth retrospective about how the game (and its predecessors) came into being, along with artwork (pretty much all of the concept art, even in digital form). THAT might be worth my money if I was a big fan of the game. Something I haven't already bought for 60 dollars.

 

[Shilkanni]

Definitely not, I've never gotten the appeal of them. They might string together some stuff which looks cool but it always fails to capture my attention. I'd probably buy every Pixar movie (even Cars) before I'd buy cutscenes/movies from Blizzard.

In fact if the opposite was the option I'd take it!
They could sell me Diablo-3-lite or WOW:Catacalysm-lite and if I could save 5-10 dollars and make it a smaller download I would.

 

[Chewster]

I almost did, for their StarCraft, Diablo II and WarCraft III[/i] set they had, though it disappeared from the stores before I could.

I think that is a bit expensive, unless it has a "making of" thing and some other bonus content.

 

[meglathon]

Oh Bob-money-grabber, why don't you just tell us strait up.
"hi guys, so im gona totaly piss you off and milk you for all your money."

OT: no never since I have the CE and the cutscenes are in the box on the making of DVD.
Like there an important part of the game, and without the game there just some pretty pictures.

 

[gamer_parent]

meh, most FFs are nearly this anyway. Oh yeah, I said it.

 

[Sniper Team 4]

A string of cutscenes? No.
A full-blown movie made by the people who do the cutscenes (script, CGI, and all)? Hell YES!

Same thing with the Bungie Reach commercials. Sad when trailers and cutscenes look more interesting than many movies that come out today.

 

[teqrevisited]

Hell no. I'd either watch them on youtube or download them and insert them into the game myself.
If that didn't work I'd pirate the damn thing.

Satan, I mean Kotick, actually said this -
"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?' Quoted from the Kotaku article.

It's almost as if he's aspiring to be one of those cliché evil businessmen from god knows how many family films. I'd say he's not that far off of cartoon super-villain, he just needs to eat more babies.

 

[Shilkanni]

Yes, it really seems like he's trying to play the role of evil CEO villain.

 

[VanityGirl]

What? That's not cool at all.

And absolutely not. I do have YouTube after all. It's the same reason I wouldn't buy a strategy guide. The internet knows all.

 

[AlphaOmega]

Hahahahahahahaha

No.

 

[Cynical skeptic]

As amazing as the sc2 cutscenes were (once I realized I forgot to max out my graphical settings), no? Hell no? Hahaha-no?

The cutscenes were typically payoff for successfully completing or (on any difficulty below brutal) staying awake during missions.

The reason video game cutscenes don't make a good movie is because once you are removed from the equation, cutscene artists typically don't know much about generating tension.

 

[Judgement101]

Oh Activision, when will you learn?

 

[Iwata]

MAYBE if they released it along side hours and hours of extra footage, like a 3-DVD pack with 10-12 hours of interviews with various designers, developers, prominent players etc, and a full in depth retrospective about how the game (and its predecessors) came into being, along with artwork (pretty much all of the concept art, even in digital form). THAT might be worth my money if I was a big fan of the game. Something I haven't already bought for 60 dollars.

You just described the DVD that comes in the collector's edition of Starcraft II.

 

[himemiya1650]

Ahahaha, he's a silly one. I would pay the day after never, I only watch them once for the most part, and never again thereafter.

 

[The Austin]

Are you fucking serious? Really? REALLY?

What kind of greedy, moronic, and all around dickish person would even consider this? Fuck you Activision, fuck you.


And by the way, the answer is "hell no".

 

[The Procrastinated End]

So lose a section (I don't know how large) of the actual story and pay half the cost of the actual game? Why wouldn't all the people without head-trauma buy this?

 

[Gralian]

I know people who go out of their way to skip cutscenes. I can't ever see this working out. Even if people were willing to pay for this, you can bet the demographic for it would be so small that they'd barely see any profit from it. And if they're going to just remove cutscenes from a game outright, you can damn well bet that people are not only going to boycott it, but it's going to get an awful lot of bad press. Whoever said 'there's no such thing as bad press' has obviously never met Kotick.

Maybe if they made a movie out of CGI sequences from a game connected to the plot but unrelated to the game itself, people would buy these 'movies' but if they're going to rip it straight out of a game and hold it ransom and call it a 'movie', i don't think this'll ever fly, period. Capitalist America is quickly going mad and turning into the (polar opposite) mirror of Communist Russia. Quick, someone call the Chinese to come and save us from these corporate fatcats.

 

[Nimzabaat]

I did. I bought the original Diablo, Starcraft and Warcraft cutscenes on dvd. I can't see how this is a new concept.

 

[masseyguy911]

Does he honestly think people would pay for that?
So NO I would NOT pay for cutscenes...

 

[The Ghost]

the most surprising thing about this thread is that no ones made a final fantasy joke yet.
on topic: no