Hacker News Reader

It's the same reason Spotify moved into podcasts and audiobooks, why Amazon moved into Prime Video, and so forth.

Basically every major subscription service is trying to expand its offerings to make its subscriptions stickier. In this case, you might want to cancel one of Netflix or Disney or HBO for the next couple months, and you were going to cancel Netflix except your kid is loving World of Goo, so you'll cancel HBO instead.

Sure, Netflix could license World of Goo and charge $5 for it directly. But not that many people are going to buy it. But literally 100x more people might download it and play it when it's free with their existing subscription, and then if just 1% of them extend their Netflix account for a couple months because of it, it's much more profitable for Netflix.

(Edit: I don't work for Netflix, this is just general industry strategy right now that I'm describing.)

I'm a bit surprised you haven't seen more of a move towards annual plans. HBO already offers a 20% discount. At some price delta you start to make switching in and out unattractive for all but the hardest core binge watcher and optimizer.

I would like to see a breakdown of how long the average user stays subscribed but I guess it’s too sensitive to ever be communicated. I don’t think I have ever subscribed more than a month at a time every couple of years to watch something very specific (or play actually - last time was because of Immortality). While I think this is an unusual customer profile, I wouldn’t be surprised if short subscriptions still represented a significant number of accounts.

I'm sure it's a significant number in the aggregate. However, knowing people and subscriptions, I suspect a very significant majority keep services for years even when they're not using them much. Certainly, I rarely cancel and, if I do, it's probably going to take something I really want to watch to pick back up again. I also don't really binge watch so if something is a season or 2 it might take me a good 6 months to watch it anyway.

I find a couple things a month on HBO Max that keep me on the service anyway. I find it hard not to have Disney+ by comparison... pretty much can't get hulu, verizon or half a dozen other things I use(d) without Disney+, wonder how much they're cheating on their subscriber counts or how much they're actually making.

Nice theory, but how is your kid going to love World of Goo when:

> Note: Netflix games aren't available for Kids profiles.

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/121442

Is there a name for this missing of the forest for the trees?

It’s not exactly that either but it’s close to sealioning.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning

This looks like a case "straw manning" the original argument.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

It's not exactly that, the GP isn't claiming something the parent didn't say, they're just treating the example as the whole point. They act as if attacking the example invalidates the whole argument, when the point clearly stands and it's trivial to just find a better example.

Yeah it would be nice if there were a more specific word, but I think this still qualifies as a straw-man. It misrepresents the argument as a whole by acting as if refuting the "your kid" example refutes it completely.

On the Netflix app it takes maybe 3 seconds to change profiles. Does it work differently with their games?

No idea. But if you let your kid use your profile to play, how are YOU going to enjoy World of Goo?

You're allowed up to 5 profiles. Why does this line of technicality even matter?

Because of the absurdity of offering kids games, but disallowing them from kids profiles.

Is world of goo a kids game? I mean, it's appropriate for kids, but it doesn't seem to target them particularly. This adult enjoys it.

This is most likely lawyer CYA, rather than any real attempt to stop kids from playing games. Is it absurd? Yes. Is anyone going to have any issues with it? No.

It's also a sure way to boost piracy.

Service providers don't seem to learn that by restricting access to content they only incentivize people to pirate it instead. The more accessible content is, the less likely it is to be pirated.

The music and gaming industries have mostly caught on, but for some reason TV and film are still clinging to their old ways.

Not that I'm agreeing or disagreeing, but it's kind of funny you mention that in the context of World of Goo, a game that famously was a gigantic hit, extremely affordable, made with love by two indy devs… and had a 90% piracy rate

https://www.destructoid.com/wankers-world-of-goo-has-a-90-pi...

There's no data for that 90% claim.

There presumably was behind the dead link, see https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/world-of-goo-piracy-rate-82

The original claim was based on the number of IPs that submitted to the leaderboard compared to the number of games sold.

But if it's IP-based, it's completely unreliable. My home DSL gets a new IP# every 24h and I know that is not uncommon in Europe at least. I bought it both for Mac and iOS, and I would be responsible for hundreds of false-positive "pirated installs" as I played it a long time.

The link addresses that by saying 76% of player IDs only connected from 1 IP. So the 90% is high, but not by a massive amount.

As the other comment pointed out, there is. The lack of DRM meant that anyone could submit to the leaderboard. Which, to me at least, sounds like it should be one of the more reliable estimates out there all things considered.

I had a pirated version on PC but it was such a great game I bought it for Wii as it was much more fun to play it there. So piracy != lost sales.

Sorry, my bad: the devs weren't actually mad about this, the journalist writing about it was. In another article[0] the devs state:

> "by the way, just in case it’s not 100% clear, we’re not angry about piracy, we still think that DRM is a waste of time and money, we don’t think that we’re losing sales due to piracy, and we have no intention of trying to fight it."

[0] https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/world-of-goo-piracy-rate-82

The guys running netflix now (35-45) were the kids and college students (14-25) running limewire and gnutella and later bittorrent and/or DC++. They might have even chanted "Dee Cee Plus Plus!" over and over at QuakeCon. They were the OG movie and TV pirating generation. They absolutely learned what was up and how cause and effect work in this industry.

And yet they're still ruled by the industry they have license agreements with. Which is partly why they started their own production studio.

All streaming services are not much more than a coat of paint over the same old industry practices. Why do you think every media conglomerate has their own streaming service?

Yeah, the kid thing especially. (Mine likes Octonauts and Ada Twist.)

My analysis: They already have subscribers. They're looking for ways to maximize retention of existing subscribers, as opposed to creating a new source for subscribers. Get someone hooked on a game, and they have another reason to stay on Netflix.

The cost of acquisition for most of their gamers is likely close to zero -- depending on how you think about it. They can use their existing platform to direct people to play games.

I also suspect they're licensing the games, which could theoretically be relatively low cost, especially compared to the cost of some of their video productions.

Hmm, yes, it's possible they want to diversify like many other tech companies recently. Add a music service and bundle everything into Netflix One?

The existing services are pretty much interchangeable, especially from a content perspective, and there are already at least three of them--one of which probably has the strongest brand and the other two are already integrated with a bunch of other services.

I'm playing it right now. You have to sign in to Netflix to use it.

whoa. well, that's certainly a choice they can make, but it's an extremely cheap and seedy look.

It's not that different than apps which require you to authenticate with Google or Facebook.

Which is also a seedy look, and risky with Google tending to close accounts without recourse.

But although I used hundreds of apps, I don't think any of them authenticate with my Google or Facebook accounts anyway - except for work apps, and those all use work Google accounts which I don't control.

In practice each of my devices has a different primary Gooogle account unique to the device, and my Facebook account is only used inside an isolated Facebook container in my desktop browser, never on the phone.

It's a strange thing but I trust Netflix more, especially more than Facebook, which is why my phone is logged into the same Netflix account as my TV and laptop.

i do not use those apps either, but this particular case is cheap-feeling in a very different way. it's like, if you were required to go buy a mcdonalds meal in order to get a specific toy, how much would you think of the toy? similarly here, if the game is any good then i should just be able to go buy it from some store (or the developer's website) and play it. if you're gating it behind "you have to have a netflix account in order to play this game" even though it is an offline game with no connection to netflix, that just cheapens it.

the sad thing is that "world of goo" is actually an excellent game, and does not deserve to have its image tarnished like this.

it's weird the app stores don't have a mechanism for this

you can actually see 1 star reviews from people who downloaded it and couldn't play

i know apple has a mechanism for it, i can't download apple+ games