Well, I've been complaining for a while that games have been becoming less of a game and more of an interactive movie. Guess someone in the industry finally realized this also, and is looking to market it differently. And to that, I say good job. But that's about all I can complement. A fair price I would put on this, digitally distributed, for an hour and a half, would be about $10, nowhere near the $20-30 that Kotick wants. And at either price, it's not going to do gangbusters; movie theaters have the benefit of 'price per person' that a DVD doesn't have.
There is a different direction that I think would be better to go with this: remove the cutscenes from the game disk entirely, and just make game. This will drastically reduce the amount of space needed for the game. If it's a big enough game, the "movie" disk with the cut scenes can be an extra item for the limited edition release. Or hell, maybe even, on the movie disk, have an install cut scenes option; the game upon boot can check and set a 1-bit flag for movie install (0=no, 1=yes) and load the movie if the flag is set to yes. I could even see it going to DLC cut scenes, but my concern here is that those make up most of the space on a disk, so they'd take a while to download at their current resolutions; instead, I see them selling you an unlock key to access the movie already on the disk, and I personally hate unlock keys...
Either way, if it means that the game has to be able to stand on the gameplay, and not the cinematics, like many current "games" do, then it's a good thing for gaming. Alas, I do think it'll leave the games unchanged, and just be a compilation of cut scenes from the game, maybe with some smoothing in-between footage to make a semi-coherent movie...
-dunno001
-On a quest for the truly perfect game; I don't think it exists...
