They also just shut down a AAA game studio that was years into an unannounced project, so they're on a roll with throwing away interactive content. But not to worry, AI will fix their gaming ambitions... somehow.
Games run a high risk of "we ran this project very well and the game still ended up boring as hell." This is not unheard of outside of games - plenty of failed launch SAAS or social or whatever software - but it's particularly crucial in entertainment since "fun" will make people tolerate a LOT of other issues with your software.
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?
Jason Hall's claim there was very incorrect and he later walked it back. People tried very hard to find a context in which was true and the best anyone could come up with was that the horse had higher day one profits by virtue of that it cost basically nothing to make and SC2 wasn't profitable off preorders alone.
That would be wonderful news, because his claim is extremely depressing. I'm finding a bit of chatter on it on reddit, but do you happen to have a link to anything substantial? Particularly him walking it back?
You're spot on about playing during development. But I don't think the point about microtransactions should be extrapolated from.
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.
> Indie developers have shown that the cost to make a game is much lower than large game publishers are spending ... Then, over-budgeting leads to under-performing.
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?
Maybe so, but some leadership is more terrible than others. In the five or so years that Amazon has been seriously trying to do AAA games they've cancelled four of them, launched a live service game only to put it back into closed beta when it flopped and then killed it outright, and now have six active projects in varying degrees of development hell with no release windows. The few games they have managed to actually ship are mid at best.
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.
It'll be a shame if they shutter their gaming division. While they themselves haven't produced anything worthy of note, their catalog of games on iOS/Android is impressive. High quality licensed content (like Hades, Monument Valley, GTA, Sonic, Kentucky Route Zero, Oxenfree, Braid) with zero ads or microtransactions, all free with your Netflix subscription.
It could very well be that they had bad ideas that were not going to turn into good games and figured that out in time to cancel things and not burn more money. Technically that's good 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.
I have to agree, the interactive content was annoying more than anything. I couldn't watch their only interactive show because it required so much interactivity without being fun.
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
The fundamental problem with interactive shows is that Netflix has to produce 10 hours of very expensive content to give you a high quality 1 hour walkthrough. It then only becomes worth it if you keep going back and trying all the different branches, but that's not really going to happen. Might as well make en entire season of a regular show with the same budget.
Any interactive content is interesting for at best 15 mins before FOMO dread sets in for me. After a few false starts, I just don't even start any interactive content at all. This may be the factor driving the decision if common enough.
Another problem with it (for me) is that when there's multiple branches, choosing any given one feels arbitrary. Media feels pointless if it wasn't created with intention. It's the same reason I can't take AI art seriously. Art is meaningful when it's contextualized with its creator and creation. When you dumb down the intention of creation or sidestep it by putting out multiple versions/branches, that puts it firmly in the content category as opposed to art.
Curious, because I understand the benefit of removing all of them (one less thing to maintain across all the platforms they support). Which certainly makes sense if they were not popular. But what is the benefit of removing some, but not removing all? You still need to keep the code and the complexity around until all can be removed.
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)
Funny that the technical reality is the inverse, i.e. media is read-only and storage/playback is now trivial beyond availability, software is executable and requires a degree of active maintenance.
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]
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.
Sure, this is the real world of humans after all. Or more precisely, it is the fake real world of Hollywood humans. That said, having actual money on the line does have a way of clarifying people's thinking...sometimes.
Whatever your opinion about online piracy, it plays an indispensable role in maintaining access to media that corporations choose to abandon. But I wonder in the case of this kind of novel media if pirated copies can maintain the original experience.
My daughter will be bummed about this news, though I'm glad at least a few are surviving. I don't get why they'd make this content and then just kill it. Is this like "we don't want to support the feature anymore" kind of thing? That doesn't really make sense though because they're leaving some around. Disappointing.
This is one thing that fascinates me about the streaming model.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
>They have to pay the people who were part of the making for having the content available - even if no one streams it.
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.
Sort of surprised it doesn't work sort of like Spotify, residuals based on performance. So unused content gets nothing, but also being cheap to have it available.
Spotify works under a royalties for musical performers - not residuals.
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.
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.
I also discovered Storyteller among the Netflix games and loved it: truly a gem. However, just like you said, when I finished it, I didn't have any reason to come back to it.
"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.
I really believe that if Netflix launched its interactive media with a miniseries of Goosebumps: Choose Your Own Adventure adaptations (instead of... whatever Bandersnatch was...) the format could have been a huge success.
I still want to Escape from the Carnival of Horrors(TM).
Wouldn't that effectivly be a Visual Novel (DDLC) or Graphic Novel (Maniac Mansion)? If you have good IP and Story, aren't games in this style pretty straightforward to create?
Isn't this effectively how the interactive materials behave, or am I misunderstanding? It was my understanding that they all were analogous to DVD-style interactive extras where you essentially choose left or right at points in the story.
Think it was a just a gamble. They have lower latency edge CDNs than literally everyone else in tech, so they’re in the best position to deliver cloud gaming. And this approach enabled them to roll it out to all user devices without needing any software upgrades.
It’s a neat idea, but the games they made simply aren’t fun.
I was surprised when they moved towards the medium at all. I enjoyed Bandersnatch when it came out, but it seemed like a lot of extra work (especially relative to the amount of content and viewership) to have on each of their clients - and they have a _ton_ of supported platforms. It's just so much less portable than a traditional video is.
I have zero interest in playing games on Netflix. It's just not what I subscribe to Netflix for.
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.
> These films will soon exit the service because the rights acquired by Netflix as part of its licensing deal will end at the end of the month. This standard content licensing practice is also the reason why “Friends” is no longer available in the U.S. or Mr. Robot” is no longer available in Arabic countries.
Netflix updated it's UI for me recently and seems to have removed anything decent about their app. Or they've hidden it sooo deep I can't find it. For example instead of browsing the new and popular titles to see what I like and setting reminders for the things that catch my interest, I'm left with their absolutely dogshit recommendation algorithm. I'm close to leaving because of how bad they've fucked the UI.
If grocery stores were like Netflix (or all streamers I think), every day, everything would have moved to different aisles because customers love having to spend ages finding the thing they came in looking for.
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.
> If grocery stores were like Netflix (or all streamers I think), every day, everything would have moved to different aisles because customers love having to spend ages finding the thing they came in looking for.
What country are you from? US grocery stores move shit around all the time for a very same reason.
Buy a subscription when something good comes from Netflix, watch that thing, then cancel your subscription. I gave up Netflix years ago because I realized I'm just scrolling the same 15-20 Netflix Originals in every category.
I bought the og battle star series on DVD for $90 in the early 00's. My parents bought most of the MASH seasons and they were a bit cheaper but they were still over $50 per season.
But they didn't charge you $18 a month to keep it in your library, it could just sit on a shelf.
Yet in the past, renting the movie you wanted to watch cost a scant couple dollars.
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.
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.