Netflix is removing nearly all of its interactive titles
theverge.com
theverge.com
https://www.404media.co/netflix-games-ai-exec/
This is all very reminiscent of Amazons gaming push which had an enormous bankroll but mostly squandered it due to terrible leadership.
My impression was this was the game industry in general. Some of the management credentials / experience I've seen. Specifically, lack thereof.
Just because it's a creative endeavor shouldn't excuse all norms of effective management. (*cough* chrisroberts *cough*)
They also spent god knows how much money on a no-strings-attached CryEngine license to use as a basis of their own in-house fork, which was such a flop internally that they ended up just open sourcing it to zero fanfare. I don't think anyone is using it, even for free.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/what-is-the-best-game-engine-i...
Beyond "maybe making a huge investment in a creative space hits-driven-business is not a wise move", the actual project leadership may or may not have been any good here. Might just be that they didn't make something fun and compelling enough, or that they just didn't find enough players, or that the marketing fit isn't right for "games with Netflix subscription." You can certainly kill an entertainment project with terrible management, but anything more than "adequate" isn't likely to give you any extra sparks of inspiration. (Hell, sometimes some chaos might be good for that.)
There are two problems here. One is when people haven't played the game enough during development. Everyone on the dev floor should know whether the game is fun or not, and which parts are the most fun and most boring. Often when games end up bland and boring, you find out that devs have been raising this alarm for a year, but management -- who have never played video games and probably think they're stupid -- ignored them in favor of their own ideas. It's the same problem as not talking to your clients when writing any software.
The second problem can be summed up thusly[1]: "I worked two years of overtime straight on Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty. Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty made less money than the first Sparkle Pony horse in World of Warcraft. A $15 microtransaction horse made more money than Starcraft 2". -- Jason Hall, former Blizzard employee. Starcraft 2 was a fun game, well-crafted with love. It made less money than a single cosmetic microtransaction in WoW. Why would game companies waste their time making fun games?
Besides the fact that Hall was wrong about the numbers, there's also the fact that he's kind of missing the point. The Sparkle Pony horse made money because it was dirt cheap to produce and lucked into a niche and moment that resonated with enough players to get them to part with their disposable income. It was a consumable item, low-interest-rate phenomenon, and one-hit wonder. A full game like SC2 is (a lot) more work but also, if done right, a lot more durable.
The other problem with SC2 and increasingly most other AAA games though is that they're over-budgeted. Indie developers have shown that the cost to make a game is much lower than large game publishers are spending. But the problem is not the raw cost as such, it's how the money is spent. There was a certain expectation for what it meant to be a Blizzard game, but it wasn't really aligned with what the suits thought (not getting into what has happened to that company since). It took a small fraction of the SC2 budget to make the original StarCraft, and it just can't be demonstrated that the budget increase (adjusted for inflation) reflects a proportional increase in fun or quality. And, ironically, the good devs are still getting underpaid. Just because a lot of money is being spent doesn't mean it's being spent well.
Then, over-budgeting leads to under-performing. If a game that cost $10 million to create made $50 million, then surely a game that cost $100 million to create will make $500 million! Well, maybe, if you're Rockstar and it's RDR2, but otherwise, you're just taking a much bigger risk. Moreover, you know it's a risk, you can feel the weight of the budget during development, and you start producing anodyne crap that isn't that fun but shows a lot of superficial value for the money.
I think this is a great insight. Rather than taking a big gamble on a $100M game, you'd think a better strategy would be taking 20 smaller gambles on smaller teams putting out $5M passion projects. The revenue profile for a successful $100M game vs. a successful $5M game just doesn't seem that different. Maybe by a factor of 2 or 4, but not 20.
I suspect it's the standard principal agent problem where no one decision-maker individually benefits from instituting this change; rather, each individual manager is trying to optimize the total headcount underneath them, leading to bloat.
Are any major studios currently pursuing the "smaller passion projects" strategy? Paradox, maybe?
Granted and unavoidable in creative endeavors.
But there's a ridiculous number of game development studios that incinerate money without completing anything.
That's simply bad project management.
Games are a space where ideas that seem good at first blush might take a lot of effort to prove that they are bad.
There isn't much data available on a "theory of fun" so we mostly have to deal with hoping people have good ideas and brute force testing.
As for their gaming department, they can't stop that soon enough. It's a horrible annoyance on my tv and I have zero trust in them
What do they win by removing the ones they remove but not all?
Software can be kept going with some maintenance investment. If you built it, you can keep it running for as long as you like.
A movie or tv show, on the other hand, is a complex web of rights and contracts. The initial launch aligns everyone’s interests, but releasing it in new countries or on new media types requires business and legal discussion. If it’s worth it, it’ll happen.
Each one of those agreements is also time-limited, and so if you do nothing you can still end up with a title that is too much trouble to keep around.
(All the above is speculative wrt these titles in particular. But go look at Moonlighting as a tv show that was blocked for many years due to this)
Both storage (and retrieval) and playback are based on software.
Basically, the recording is in an obscure video format. People at the NSA can’t easily watch it, so they can’t redact it. So they won’t do anything. [0]
0. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/07/the-nsa-has-a...
Nope. That would require both rationality (extremely unlikely) and perfect information (impossible)
The reality is that it's somewhat more likely to happen if everybody involved thinks it's a good idea, and one reason (but only one) they might think that is because they believe "it's worth it" whatever their understanding of that is. But never certain, and equally, never impossible. Messy.
tl;dr;
It's probably costing them more when people stream those titles, then those titles generate.
The issue is residuals. They have to pay the people who were part of the making for having the content available - even if no one streams it.
At some point, the cost of the residuals is greater than the revenue generated by the content.
https://www.sagaftra.org/sites/default/files/sa_documents/St...
https://fortune.com/2023/09/30/why-hollywood-actors-still-on...
https://variety.com/2024/tv/news/netflix-financial-analyst-r...
At some point it boils down to {cost per customer} vs {revenue per customer}.
However, because of residuals, {cost per customer} doesn't scale down as user count scales up. You ammortize the non-residual chunk of production, but that's a weird equation that likely drives the incentives we see playing out.
I'd assume residuals are lower / non-existent on the much-bemoaned formulaic Netflix fodder movies? Hence why they keep getting stuffed in services.
As I understand it, the residuals are for things beyond the original contract. So if you have a broadcast show, that gets paid out. Then it goes to syndication - residuals get paid. Then it goes to streaming - residuals get paid.
However, with an in house production by a streaming service... from the Fortune link ( and http://web.archive.org/web/20231001022043/https://fortune.co... if you have trouble with the link)
> So shows originally produced for broadcast television aren’t an issue. When “Friends,” which was originally an NBC sitcom, generates $1 billion dollars on streaming platforms, the five leads each earn 2%, or $20 million apiece. But a show like “Stranger Things” – produced and owned by Netflix – never goes to a secondary market as long as it is aired only on Netflix, so the stars earn only their original pay.
> The problem, then, comes from the fact that the existing residual model, per the expiring SAG-AFTRA contract, doesn’t take streaming into account.
> In the streaming era, all new shows produced by streaming platforms are concurrently reruns and original runs. Actors want 2% of streaming revenue generated by the show or film to replace this line of income.
Netflix (and all other streamers and broadcasts) work under a residuals system.
Two different groups of content producers (musicians and actors) negotiated different models for how the long tail of licensing the content they helped create worked. Some of the economics of residuals changed with the contract that was negotiated last year with SAG.
And no one seems to stream the interactive stuff, so it makes sense to get rid of it. Shame they didn't do the residuals so that they could just keep this stuff around though.
Bandersnatch is neat. And I see that is staying. Which tracks because "Choose Your Own Adventure" is decently suited to a "TV Remote" experience.
However, my wife found this game "Storyteller" on the Switch. I also found it on iOS and noticed the Netflix intro would play when I opened it. Then I saw the promo for it on Netflix. Turns out, it's a Netflix game. And it's cute, but it's not a lot. You can complete the game and most of the bonus bits in a few hours. And once you're done, that's it. There's nothing to do. The little vignettes are very simple story wise. And there's no real through plot. Like, I don't need to play that ever again. It's not even like a game like Super Mario World, where the gameplay itself is enjoyable.
So between the interface issue and the type of games they pushed, this is probably for the best.
"Into the Breach", on the other hand, kept me coming back for a long time. It's definitely an iOS game though: completely unsuitable for most devices that use Netflix.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/25/21720533/netflix-banders...
I still want to Escape from the Carnival of Horrors(TM).
Maybe they had money lying around and there was no market need. I'd be curious to know.
It’s a neat idea, but the games they made simply aren’t fun.
There was probably someone pushing this who hoped adding interactivity to videos would be as revolutionary as adding hyperlinks to the web.
I know that the Black Mirror thing was a success, but I didn't even really like that. Gaming, and sitting back on my lazy ass to watch content passively are two very different mental modes.
When I want to play games, I put on a game.
When I want to get fat or fall asleep after long work day, I put on Netflix.
I have no idea how representative I am of the average subscriber, but if most people are like me then I would like to offer a big "I told you so" because it made no sense to me when Netflix announced that they were starting to branch out into games.
I mean, if Netflix has grown to peak numbers and needs new markets to enter, then by all means produce games but they might want a more suitable distribution channel like Steam or producing console games for mass retail etc.
So, a complete non story.
Netflix played a shell game with people's idea of value. A $18 Netflix subscription might seem not bad, it's less than an hour's work for most people! But that $2k a year?
How many people spent $2k a year buying and renting media? My family spent like $100 a year doing that.
The entire point of the subscription model is to take advantage of the way your brain processes value. I've given Spotify like $8k over the course of my subscription. I definitely do not regularly listen to $8k worth of music. If I cut off the long tail of the weird stuff I listen to, I probably listen to less than $500 of music in my lifetime, and very little of that went to the actual artists I like.
$18 * 12 = $216
I'm only a whole magnitude off!
But they didn't charge you $18 a month to keep it in your library, it could just sit on a shelf.
For example, “continue watching” is never in the same place in my experience.
Whereas in Plex it’s always top and center meaning I can always find it instantly.
Pirating is again becoming the superior product, even though I’ve already paid plenty for the legal options.
What country are you from? US grocery stores move shit around all the time for a very same reason.