Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick said it's likely his company will begin selling in-engine cutscenes as full movies in the near future.
Speaking today at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Media, Communications & Entertainment Conference in California, Kotick said StarCraft II's in-game cinematics are so good that the publisher could edit them into one film and distribute it to fans digitally, a move, he said, is likely to happen sometime in the next five years.
"If we were to take that hour, or hour an 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?'
Kotick continued to say he believes his business model is superior to that of current film studios, saying a StarCraft movie distributed by the publisher would crush any opening weekend box office record ever.
"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," he said.
"Within the next five years, you are likely to see us do that. It might be in a partnership with somebody or alone, but 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.
"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."
Would you pay to watch an in-game cutscene movie?