Kotick wants to sell you cut-scenes

Are you on the lookout for a man that says what he thinks and doesn’t mind risking upsetting people? Well here he is – Bobby Kotick is at it again.

This time the outspoken business leader and Activision publishing CEO has stated that he’d like to start charging gamers to watch the cut-scenes featured in his games.

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 told an audience at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Media, Communications & Entertainment Conference in California, as reported by IGN.

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 capitalise 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.”

Last year Kotick enraged some consumers by claiming that he wanted to raise the RRP of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 even higher than the already controversial 54.99 the publisher eventually released the game for.

A shrewder businessman you’ll not find in the games industry. Nor will you find many others capable of puffing their chests and standing up to the platform holders.

Last year Kotick threatened to drop PS3 development if the platform holder didn’t lower the price of its machine. Just weeks later Sony announced the launch of its cut-price PS3 Slim.

Then earlier this year Kotick lashed out at Microsoft, claiming that it wouldn’t be making anywhere near as much money were it not for the popularity of Call of Duty.