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Television Movies

Netflix Is Removing Nearly All of Its Interactive Titles (theverge.com) 52

Posted by BeauHD from the fun-while-it-lasted dept.
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.
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Netflix Is Removing Nearly All of Its Interactive Titles More

Netflix Is Removing Nearly All of Its Interactive Titles

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  • Netflix has interactive titles? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Monday November 04, 2024 @08:35PM (#64920101) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • 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?

    • Do you remember the "choose your own adventure" books? Same thing, but a film.

      • 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.

      • Bandersnatch was kinda fun because the same choices looped would change. I recall Kimmy Schmidt being enjoyable too, not sure I tried the others. Not sure why they'd remove them unless they had trouble carrying the tech forward to new interface standards or something.
        • I saw my wife interacting with the Sandiego story and found the interactivity to be pointless. You are given two options at certain points of the story, but only one of them makes it advance, as if the other was wrong. That's not so much of a choice, and if you have no choice, why bother with interactivity?

          • 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)

              by NotRobot ( 8887973 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2024 @01:53AM (#64922927)

              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.)

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Kisai ( 213879 )

            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

      • I had a Final Destination 3 DVD with this gimmick. It was apparent that some of the branches were early takes of scenes that were revised and rewritten before the movie came out in theaters.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by upuv ( 1201447 )

      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?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by havana9 ( 101033 )
      Bandersnatch was an interactive title. The viewer could choose what happens in the next senes and the story goes on differen sides.
      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.

    • >> What's an interactive title?
      It's when the headline is wrong, you can edit it like Wikipedia :)

    • 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

    • 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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kisai ( 213879 )

      "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.

    • "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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by reanjr ( 588767 )

      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.

  • The technology served its purpose

    Have they done enough research that they feel the interactive ad trials are ready?

  • thanks f*** (Score:3, Interesting)

    by kalieaire ( 586092 ) on Monday November 04, 2024 @09:57PM (#64920209)
    i've always hated the fact they were trying to put stupid games and interactive bs. i go to netflix to watch stuff, i don't have any braincells to use anything else.

  • Interactive entertainment has always been BS. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Eunomion ( 8640039 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2024 @01:40AM (#64920437)
    If you really want interactivity, it's called gaming. And if you really really want interactivity, it's called doing stuff in reality. People who pay to watch movies and TV shows want the service they're buying to do the work, obviously. But for some reason they forget that every decade or so and introduce "interactive entertainment" like they just discovered a new concept.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Bert64 ( 520050 )

      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.

    • CYOA books and Lone Wolf books are nostalgic fun, I can't blame them apart from that these seem to be even more ethereal than traditional video games for preserving.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        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

    • 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

  • 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.

  • And I was waiting for my interactive TV on my 500 channel cable TV hook up. They promised this in the early 1990s.

  • 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.

  • If they're leaving the two titles in, then they have to keep supporting the functionality. Sort of weird that they're deleting the other titles if it doesn't let them remove the relevant code. If a title is not doing well, I guess the idea would be to stop paying residuals, but that would seem to be more of a case-by-case basis, rather than removing these as a group.
  • Clue VCR Mystery Game [wikipedia.org] still packing murderous surprises. And the perennial Star Trek: The Next Generation Interactive VCR Board Game. Classic interactive. [wikipedia.org] A real crowd pleaser.

  • Netflix could stand to remove a lot more than just the "interactive" titles. Maybe the 98% of titles that are pure garbage.

  • I thought the interactive titles were fun with the family, especially younger kids. We enjoyed some of the shorts they had made. But I only ever saw like 2 or 3 suggested to me. Had I known there were more, especially a Puss in Boots one, I would have seeked them out. I just thought they were slowly still adding more titles. A shame they try to show me titles I will never watch, but didn't show us these when we had selected every interactive one they suggested to us in the past. I get it is not for all, bu

  • Games are interactive, right?

    *crosses fingers*

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