Netflix Is Removing Nearly All of Its Interactive Titles (theverge.com) 52
According to The Verge, Netflix plans to delist almost all of its interactive shows and films as of December 1st. Only four of the 24 interactive titles will remain: Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs. the Reverend, Ranveer vs. Wild with Bear Grylls, and You vs. Wild. From the report: The removal of the titles marks a disappointing conclusion to Netflix's earliest efforts into interactive content. The company first launched the interactive titles in 2017 with Puss in Book: Trapped in an Epic Tale, and I remember being wowed (and horrified) by paths in Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. In addition to specials based on franchises like Carmen Sandiego and Boss Baby, Netflix also tried ideas like a daily trivia series and a trivia game you could play with a friend. But the relatively few titles available suggests the format wasn't much of a hit -- Puss in Book has apparently been gone for a while. "The technology served its purpose, but is now limiting as we focus on technological efforts in other areas," spokesperson Chrissy Kelleher says.
Netflix has interactive titles? (Score:3, Insightful)
What's an interactive title?
No, seriously. Just like the whole Netflix game studio thing, I keep hearing about companies like Netflix cancelling things that I've never heard of and didn't even know that they did. Not that I would necessarily care even if I did know, but I've actually seen one of the shows that one of those interactive titles is based on, and I *still* haven't heard of it.
Maybe Netflix should use that top box to highlight new features instead of wasting it on shows that I am almost never interested in.
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What's an interactive title?
No, seriously. Just like the whole Netflix game studio thing, I keep hearing about companies like Netflix cancelling things that I've never heard of and didn't even know that they did. Not that I would necessarily care even if I did know, but I've actually seen one of the shows that one of those interactive titles is based on, and I *still* haven't heard of it.
Maybe Netflix should use that top box to highlight new features instead of wasting it on shows that I am almost never interested in.
That was my question. Are we supposed to yell at the TV now?
Re:Netflix has interactive titles? (Score:5, Funny)
Are we supposed to yell at the TV now?
I've been doing that for 50 years - even without Netflix's help!
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I can't stand watching movies/shows with people who constantly talking.
You'd love the old silent movies then!
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So basically just what I was thinking. Of course, my problem with the "choose your own adventure" is the same I have with a lot of RPG games - my reaction on what I'd do when the choice comes up matches none of the options.
Re:Netflix has interactive titles? (Score:4, Funny)
If you want Calculon to race to the lasergun battle in his hover Ferrari, press 1.
If you want Calculon to double-check his paperwork, press 2. Enter now!
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Yes, this was the Dragon's Lair style. In Dragon's Lair any wrong choice lead to a bad ending immediately, so that it really was a completely linear narrative. The newer stuff on Netflix actually had the choices lead to very different changes, even different plots, and while some of the choices were clearly "wrong", most of them were not. It's been a long time, but I feel that the Black Mirror episode had more variance in the plot and endings than the majority of video games that have multiple endings. On
Re:Netflix has interactive titles? (Score:4, Interesting)
Since you mentioned Dragon's Lair...
It was actually not completely linear. True, every 'scene' had the exact same script and set of expected actions, sometimes very timing-critical, that you had to take to avoid the bad outcomes (i.e., dying). As bit of trivia, there was in fact sometimes more than one correct move producing the same outcome - for example, Down and Left would work equally well at one point at the end of the Lizard-King scene.
But the order of the scenes was not the same from game to game. You would get them in a randomized order, including mirrored versions of certain scenes. There was always a surprise factor when you started the game and got a scene you had never seen before. Of course you still had to complete them all to reach the dragon scene.
So it was linear in the sense that there was exactly one expected correct path through each scene (with optional moves allowed in some cases) and no alternate successful paths but the order of the scenes was never the same (except for the dragon scene which was always the last one).
(Speaking as someone who spent a lot of snack/lunch money on the arcade as a schoolkid...and this was before the Internet, so the only way to learn the correct moves was by experimenting and dying a lot or as hearsay from a friend who had heard it from someone who had heard it from someone else and so on. And you would get a lot of bad advice that way. Guys who knew how to complete the ending of the Lizard-King scene were local heroes and a secretive lot. Virtually no-one knew how to complete the dragon scene since almost nobody made it that far.)
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We Lost Our Human makes better use of it. It's listed as "Netflix's largest Interactive feature"
Basically the story goes like this:
Act I (you can not return to this without completing Act III, three times):
Initial "tutorial" of two choices, both bring the video back to the same place (Pud or Ham save the photo)
Choice of "Family Hug" (Ham) or "Offer Tummy" Pud
Choice of "Get Pumped" (Ham) or "Strut Around" (Pud), that causes the inciting incident
Choice of "Slurp up Chili" or "Squeal on Ham"
Choice of Leash (Ha
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You beat me to it.
What interactive titles? And what exactly are they? Follow your own adventure style? Was it restricted to a subset of devices?
I've never even heard about these things before.
Were they any good?
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Or if you prefer a cartoon with damsel in distress and adventures in dungeons, think about Dragon's lair, but instead of using a CAV laserdisc, a streaming device it's used.
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Re: Netflix has interactive titles? (Score:1)
when the headline is wrong, you can edit it (Score:2)
>> What's an interactive title? :)
It's when the headline is wrong, you can edit it like Wikipedia
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The only one I have experience with is Minecraft: Story Mode thanks to my son stumbling on it. It played (from what I could tell) indentically to the PC game version of it. Plays a cutscene, gives you a timer to choose A or B or C with your TV remote, then goes on to the appropriate cutscene, until you work through the whole story. Different choices give you different cutscenes, but eventually you end up in the same place - the end of the story.
I assume they're all variations of Telltale Studios games, base
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What's an interactive title?
No, seriously. Just like the whole Netflix game studio thing, I keep hearing about companies like Netflix cancelling things that I've never heard of and didn't even know that they did.
Well if they're cancelling stuff, the stuff so unsuccessful you never heard of it is probably the stuff they should be cancelling.
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What's an interactive title?
No, seriously. Just like the whole Netflix game studio thing, I keep hearing about companies like Netflix cancelling things that I've never heard of and didn't even know that they did.
Well if they're cancelling stuff, the stuff so unsuccessful you never heard of it is probably the stuff they should be cancelling.
Maybe, but the question remains: Did nobody hear about it because it was unsuccessful, or was it unsuccessful because nobody heard about it? And that's my point.
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"We Lost Our Human" is actually done very well.
Netflix probably just wants to stop paying royalties to those involved.
That said, the interactive stuff could easily be turned into a PC game, they're barely more involved than a Visual Novel that uses animated sequences. Heck, this technology has been available on Blueray since the beginning, that's how the damn menu's work.
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"Choose your own adventure" style of shows. At certain points in the show you can use your controller to select among a few alternative (runs away, stands and fights, hides in the closet). I only watched on, a Black Mirror one. It was good felt, but it is a bit tedious to try out alternate options (as a gamer, I like to see all the endings). But it seemed like it was a very complex project (aka, expensive) to create vastly different story lines that were kept interesting, entertaining, and plausible all w
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Choose Your Own Adventure content.
I'd actually really like to check some of the titles out, but they never bothered making it work with Chromecast, so I'd have to watch on my laptop or phone.
Purpose (Score:2)
The technology served its purpose
Have they done enough research that they feel the interactive ad trials are ready?
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How exactly is Netflix removing a feature, news fo (Score:1)
Explain:
Re: How exactly is Netflix removing a feature, new (Score:1)
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Seems all the streamers do this some what on purpose.
By trimming the catalogue occasionally they can concentrate viewing on a few titles. Ones with more favourable licensing terms etc.
But also they have the ability to re-release titles in the future to make it appears as if the platform is getting a lot of new material over time. In actuallity it's just a refresh of an older title.
It just makes you vomit. (Score:2)
>> AI generated interactive movies on demand in the future...
That already exists. It just makes you vomit.
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thanks f*** (Score:3, Interesting)
Interactive entertainment has always been BS. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Back when CD based gaming was new, there were some "games" which basically boiled down to this. You had a video or slideshow and could make very limited choices about which path to follow.
These "games" came about because of the huge storage space on a CD compared to earlier formats like floppies or cartridges.
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They're more interactive movies than video games, but in the end, they still provide entertainment. And they've been around since the 80s with the laserdisc games (think Dragon's Lair). So there's always been a small element of people who enjoy these games over the traditional twitch trigger games.
The modern equivalent has branched out - besides traditional interactive movies, there's also visual novels, walking simulators and other sub genres of interactive entertainment. They're also quite popular on Stea
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Yes true. However many video games are on the rails. Even ones with choices very often are limited to 3 or 4 endings, and you can get all the endings by just replacing the last 10 minutes or so. Whereas two interactive TV shows I did see a few years back were actually much more complex than most RPG video games I've played (though I rarely play story based stuff like last-of-us or life-is-strange). The drawback I think is that these are much more complex to make, and more expensive. Why waste time film
Bandersnatch is great (Score:2)
It's about a games programmer in the 80s building a "choose your own adventure" game ... the choice of subject matter makes it possibly the only good interactive TV show, ever.
Oh dang (Score:2)
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is a treasure (Score:2)
The interactive episode is just delightfully stupid. I was crying from laughter watching her react to the entire Taco Snake 12 Days of Christmas. (And there was even an easter egg if you sat through it twice!)
Someone (with more time than me) ought to find a way to emulate their platform and scrape the data from it so these small wonders can be preserved via piracy for when they finally and inevitably do shut them off for good.
weird (Score:2)
Never gets old (Score:2)
more (Score:2)
Netflix could stand to remove a lot more than just the "interactive" titles. Maybe the 98% of titles that are pure garbage.
Bad marketing of it killed it (Score:2)
\o/ (Score:1)
Games are interactive, right?
*crosses fingers*