Netflix Plans To Offer Video Games In Push Beyond Films, TV (bloomberg.com) 51
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Netflix, marking its first big move beyond TV shows and films, is planning an expansion into video games and has hired a former Electronic Arts and Facebook executive to lead the effort. Mike Verdu will join Netflix as vice president of game development, reporting to Chief Operating Officer Greg Peters, the company said on Wednesday. Verdu was previously Facebook's vice president in charge of working with developers to bring games and other content to Oculus virtual-reality headsets. The idea is to offer video games on Netflix's streaming platform within the next year, according to a person familiar with the situation. The games will appear alongside current fare as a new programming genre -- similar to what Netflix did with documentaries or stand-up specials. The company doesn't currently plan to charge extra for the content, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private.
Hello again mainframe dream (Score:1)
From time to time you have this dumb individual with the "what if we have a bigass computer that is accessed by many small dumb terminals?" dream, not knowing how bad it is, and how worse it would be if it actually worked, and it always fails.
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It's the usual time-share argument supposedly clever people bring up. Never thinking both technology, and computer science have advanced from the sixties in many important ways.
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The people in those companies that think that streaming video games from a massive server is a good idea are dumb individuals.
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So far capitalism just killed every attempt at game streaming.
They will have to use imperialism to force people to accept it.
Re: Hello again mainframe dream (Score:2)
Let's go all the way and go back to batch processing. Better be real nice to the drone that handles your card deck, or he may end up 'losing' your punch cards, or worse, tinker with the printed output of your program. :O)
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The idea of having a processor in your machine doing all the job is actually newer than the idea of having a big mainframe machine doing all the work, while you have the bare minimum at your house accessing it.
You know, KIM-1, apple, eventually PC clones.. all that fuss that was done to kill the stupid idea the last time.
Streaming is not the future, it is the past, a demon that appears from time to time.
Re: Hello again mainframe dream (Score:2)
We are a couple generations removed from that nightmare, so of course now we have people who never had to dial in to a mainframe with a teletype or submit decks of punch cards and wait hours or days to get the results back thinking it's such a wonderful idea.
I wonder if any of them even know this kind of history and believe it's new and that they invented it?
"S" Wannabees. (Score:2)
Seems everyone wants to either be Stadia or Steam.
If you pull it off it's worth billions (Score:3)
Also modern games can be cheap and insanely profitable. Look at Valorant. It started as a side project to keep the Titanfall devs busy between projects and it's now a billion dollar franchise.
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Didn't they cancel new development for Stadia?
Google sent me one for free, the controller has been sitting on a shelf for months.
Re: "S" Wannabees. (Score:2)
If it's a nice controller, there likely is a hack already to use it as a standard Bluetooth controller.
Waste not, want not.
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I didn't even think of that. It is a very nice controller so I'll try it. Thanks!
Hopefully it's better than Apple Arcade ! (Score:2)
What a piece of Junk (apple arcade)!! I have a Steam, Epic, Origin and GOG accounts. People don't want some new weird off beat games, and if they do those are all over steam. I just want to be able to play the games I already bought in the cloud. I would imagine if Netflix is making their own games they will mostly suck. It takes alot of time and experience to develop games you can't just decide one day 'hey lets go make some video games' . If they stick with it and learn how to do it eventually the
Apple Arcade Failed due to Arrogance (Score:4, Insightful)
It would be against their image of fashion accessory king if they gave access to messy, ugly shooters with lots of garish colors...the fun stuff. Their entire company is infused with an inherent hipster arrogance. I am not even anti-apple. I am typing this from a macbook pro. I just know that the apple lifestyle means sacrificing function for form. Most of their stuff is fine. Their laptops and ipads are even really good. I just set expectations appropriately.
However, I knew from day one that both Apple Arcade and Apple TV are doomed to fail. They care too much about their brand image to take risks. They'd never make game of thrones, for example, because the nudity and violence and controversy is too counter to their image....nor would they make doom eternal because nothing about it says great design like their computers...it's messy, violent, and fun as hell...it grosses out 3/4 of their audience.
They're too arrogant to stray from their brand to make their entertainment offerings a success.
will you be able to buy gameing without TV / movie (Score:3)
will you be able to buy gameing without TV / movies part or will be like.
$12 base change
$2 more for HD
$1 more on top of HD for 4K
Gameing $5-$15 more
Gameing remote no time limit $5 more
Gameing HD $2 more (must have TV HD)
Gameing 4K $2 more ontop of HD (must have TV 4K)
How is that supposed to work? (Score:2)
So how will that work? Even if it's a server-generated-streaming-style audio/video setup, how will input be handled?
Can all Netflix-compatible boxes/TVs accept gamepad-style input? I know the latest Apple TV boxes can work with Xbox/Playstation gamepads, but what about other hardware such as a Fire TV or Google Chromecast?
Re:How is that supposed to work? (Score:4, Interesting)
Somewhere in the last few years Netflix introduced the ability to have interactive content; the only one I'm aware of is a Captain Underpants episode where you can "choose your own adventure" or something along those lines. I discovered it in 2020 when my kids watched every episode on an AppleTV 3rd gen and then were disappointed that they couldn't watch this one because the ATV3 lacked the ability to do interactive. Newer ATVs and my 2019 Vizio TV seem capable of doing this feature, however.
So I'd imagine it might be leveraging this feature to some extent, though obviously more complicated games do have a larger payload to execute.
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Far too slow. At least for the games I play, and those aren't even twitch shooters. Even my MMO which isn't very twitch has to have a smart client to be able to handle the inherent latency of the internet; occasionally the client and server disagree and some odd stuff happens. The idea that a game can be streamed and that the client does nothing but decode video is very odd to me, none of the games I like would fit into that model. I'm even playing the older Baldur's Gate 1 right now, and I can't imagine
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<narrator="Hal Douglas">Dragon's Lair: Time Warp</narrator>
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https://www.whats-on-netflix.c... [whats-on-netflix.com]
Interactive titles have a "white star on red banner" identificator.
a scary mix (Score:2)
It's been 10 years or more... (Score:3)
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The only way it's going to ever work is if games are designed around the required latency. Nobody does that.
All the companies are technology companies looking to stream twitch-based titles, because 8-9 figures was spent on marketing. Netflix, as an entertainment company, could scout and finance other niche types of games such as Visual Novels. The Visual Novel database [vndb.org] lists over 30,000 titles some of which could be suited to a Black Mirror: Bandersnatch-style adaptation, instead of the usually anime adaptation.
Undoubtedly puzzle or graphic adventure (Myst) games will be an area of interest too. And bundling ga
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xCloud, Microsoft's offering is actually pretty decent. And it seems to work because if you go to the front page, The Master Chief Collection, an FPS, is prominently featured as supported. And informal tests show it works remarkably
Ignore hardcore, become the next Pop Cap (Score:2)
However, there's a massive gap in casual and family gaming. I'd love to open up a library of stupid games for my
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As a user and customer of both services... please don't. Not ever.
Ahh... so that's it... (Score:4, Insightful)
NetflixExec 1: We can't acquire enough content or produce it ourselves to remain fresh and relevant.
NetflixExec 2: GAMES!!!
Netflix is dead. With all the "good" content siloed with studios, networks, cable companies, and Amazon- they have no content. The content they do have is weak- and they are not producing much new original content after killing off all the shows they made that were popular.
These days you subscribe to a streaming service based on the one show which is a must watch and you pick through the other offerings. You can also pick through the free offerings on Amazon Prime. If you have cable the streaming service from the cable provider has a lot of content.
Netflix used to produce new shows at a steady clip. These days most of their stuff is stale. What happened?
It's not that they cannot afford content. Rather it's because no one is selling their content anymore. They can't buy it at any price. And for some reason they aren't producing much original stuff either.
They are a middle man and the content providers are selling direct.
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Netflix used to produce new shows at a steady clip. These days most of their stuff is stale. What happened?
COVID-19?
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Yeah. I got burned out by Netflix cancelling anything I had an interest in so these days the only thing we're watching are mediocre competition shows. There's no worry of continuity between seasons and they're all disposable.
That said, I'm sure if my fiancee could motivate herself to watch any sort of TV show with an ongoing plot, we would watch more of it...
It was nice (Score:1)
Netflix. Well, it was nice while it lasted.
The only three words you need (Score:1)
And here comes the saturation.. (Score:2)
"wE oFfEr sTrEaMiNg gAmEz tOo!"
I've seen this same pattern a million times, and this was the real reason for the video game crash of 1983, when everyone and their dog had their own incompatable gaming console and home computer on the market.
Will this cause a crash? Very unlikely as the VG market is far stronger now than in the early 80s, when game consoles were still very much seen as a novelty, but there will be damage to the VG market and jobs lost before all of this ultimately whittles down to 2 or 3 str
Re: And here comes the saturation.. (Score:2)
Re: And here comes the saturation.. (Score:2)
"Which Netflix offering do you consider to be equivalent to (Atari) ET? "
ET was just the breaking point and the crash would've still happened with or without it. The actual cause was the balkanization in the VG market because of all of the different incompatable systems, and it was a nightmare for game developers too.
Now history is repeating itself with streaming video services, and once again games are going to fall victim to it.
Example: "Want to play Call of Duty? Tough shit, toots, it's on Netflix and yo
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Listen, friend. Either we have too many choices and you have to be a responsible adult and make decisions on your own, or we get stuck with oligopolies like Microsoft-Sony-Nintendo* or Netflix-Amazon-Disney.
In any case, if history is any indication you do not have to worry because soon enough the big companies are going to be buying out the smaller ones and you won't have that many choices anymore.
* like it or not
Re: And here comes the saturation.. (Score:2)
"Listen, friend. Either we have too many choices and you have to be a responsible adult and make decisions on your own, or we get stuck with oligopolies like Microsoft-Sony-Nintendo* or Netflix-Amazon-Disney."
We did have those choices back in the early 80s, and we wound up with situations where mom would buy a Colecovision cartridge for her son's birthday but find out the hard way that it wouldn't run on the Intellivision that they had. Choice is good, yes, but when things get balkanized and confusi
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Consoles and computers not being cross-compatible, I don't see how you'd solve that. It's a technological problem. Your Coleco cart vs Intellivision console is a good example that could still happen today. You could buy a Nintendo game cart for someone and even though they own a Nintendo console, there's still a chance they won't be able to play it (3DS cart, Switch console).
A few companies once tried to establish a common platform to solve that exact problem (the 3DO [wikipedia.org]), and it failed miserably.
What you want
Re: And here comes the saturation.. (Score:2)
"A few companies once tried to establish a common platform to solve that exact problem (the 3DO), and it failed miserably."
IIRC, 3DO was very expensive when it came out, when the VG market was still firmly in the 16 bit era. They might have succeeded if they had a 'killer title' but good luck convincing Nintendo to port their Mario and Zelda franchises to any other platform (the godawful CD-i dreck not withstanding). Sega might have been open to allowing the Sonic franchise on other consoles back then, but
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Forgot to say, about "when things get balkanized and confusing"... look at the latest generation of consoles from Microsoft and Sony. The worst of the two is Microsoft, with confusing console names which unless you've learned about them are impossible to follow.
Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One (so basically the first one, followed by 360, followed by 1 - makes no sense).
And their fourth generation has two consoles: Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S. Two different models with specifications that greatly differ between
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Ick, are they _trying_ to cause a repeat of 1983 ? +_+
I am not 100% hip on game consoles these days as I don't follow current VG trends like I used to, and the games I play
tend to be the kind of stuff you see on GOG.com and the odd phone app. Even so, I knew something was up, and there
was bound to be a lot of confusion in the market.
Xbox sure sounds like the total clusterfuck, as if M$ needed anymore bad marks against them after the whole 360 RROD fiasco.
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What you find "obscene woke" is today's new normal. You're just getting too old to accept it, you are resistant to change and that's normal. Where do you think the expressions "back in my days" and "darn kids these days" come from?
For example, don't you remember that it used to be normal and legal to own another human being just because he/she had dark skin? Someone from 1880 would never fit in 1980, just like you now don't fit in 2021.
We may not like it, but we're not the future anymore. People younger tha