‘Are you still playing?’: What the future holds for Netflix’s Interactive Entertainment
To start with an understatement: The streaming world has become an incredibly crowded space. Netflix’s long standing as the streaming trailblazer has begun to fade, as fast-rising competitors HBO Max and Disney Plus learn from its moves, avoiding many of the pitfalls it first experienced. This has created an uncertainty in Netflix’s future as the leading SVOD service, a title which it has held onto for nearly a decade. However, the company still holds one card that no other company has yet been able to pull: Interactive Entertainment.
While many likely remember Black Mirror’s Bandersnatchas the first Interactive Entertainment title, the actual answer is a show that many on the platform have likely never seen — 2017’s Puss in Boots: Trapped in an Epic Tale. This is because when the Interactive Entertainment initiative was first conceived, its original target audience was actually kids, not adults.
Netflix’s former director of product innovation Carla Fisher spoke to The Verge back in 2017, outlining her mission statement as “kids think everything is interactive.” Fisher was brought in by Netflix to develop children’s titles, including Puss in Boots. While she had previously worked for PBS Kids, what made Fisher different from most is that her background was in game design, and looked at Netflix not as a streaming service, but as an “interactive device ecosystem.”
The initiative that she began has now been carried on by fellow founder of the Interactive Entertainment team and now vice president of comedy Andy Weil, and Dave Schlafman, the current design director of content experiences. These two have sought to expand its audience from children’s entertainment into more adult-oriented stories, starting with the
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