“They need to go back to being the #1 streaming content provider, not a movie studio.”
It’s war, y’all. Licensing is basically telling Netflix “You do not own shit, we do and you need to pay for it”. And Netflix said “no, we can make movies and shows too, that’s easy” and then it wasn’t easy at all, and people unsubscribed faster than pussycat.
Which makes me think of Netflix and games. Previously I thought that GaaS (Games as a Service) from Netflix was a mistake because games are so costly and take so long to make, eat so much bandwidth, with way less ways to know if one will be successful compared to TV. But now I’m thinking it might be worth it because of two things:
– Unreal and Unity. Two game engines becoming the cameras of video games and therefore, bringing an absurd amount of production problems down to the minimum.
– Games, contrary to shows and movies, are quite easily modified live. Fortnite, which is still printing money, is the poster-child of this. They analyze players data, decide to create something new for the game that will be shipped in a couple weeks, tested locally, then scaled up to the world. You absolutely cannot do that with shows and movies. Narratives and plots are super monolithic.
The problem for Netflix here is that there’s this thing called Game Pass from Microsoft which is killing it right now, there’s Steam, there’s Epic, Nintendo, Sony… And Apple and Google when it comes down to mobile games, that little market of a few billion dollars.
There’s no way in hell Netflix can battle tech giants, game giants and movie giants at once, while depending on them.
Back to DVDs? I mean, hey.