It makes no sense to me at all. If they don't want to support interactivity features in their overall Netflix.com front-end, they should release a separate app.

They're still trying to get into video games—they just bought the rights to FIFA, for goodness sakes—so they should make use of their ready-made content.

There is no way the actual code for selecting choices is particularly complicated. Maybe as part of a larger codebase it could become tech debt, but on its own?

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zamadatix 6 hours ago | parent [-]

A separate app would be a lot more work. Not only do you need to publish separate apps on all of the platforms you still need to maintain that separate app (even if it's 100% locked to bug and security patching).

If I were to guess, it had less to do with being "too difficult" and more to do with "not being worth it". I.e. they have the numbers for how many people were watching the limited interactive content from years ago, they know whether they plan on having more interactive video content, and they know how much it is to maintain across different apps (and likely don't want to fragment their service availability to support something they identify as a declining niche). Just because they may be getting into games does not mean it makes sense to have support for other interactive stuff people hardly ever watch.

They tried something different, it didn't work out to be popular enough to bother with for the rest of time, and they moved on.

	▲	Wowfunhappy 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> If I were to guess, it had less to do with being "too difficult" and more to do with "not being worth it" That's what I mean, too difficult for the expected return. > A separate app would be a lot more work. Not only do you need to publish separate apps on all of the platforms you still need to maintain that separate app We're talking about, what, Android and iOS? Those are the only platforms where Netflix has been publishing games AFAIK. I'm not suggesting they maintain it on every platform with a Netflix app! I just don't believe it would be much work. If it's an app, it doesn't even have to handle streaming, it can just play the local video file. Heck, we have a fan-made codebase we can use as a reference: https://github.com/joric/bandersnatch/blob/master/bandersnat... <500 lines of code, plus two json files which are admittedly much longer but look auto-generated. I assume they came from Netflix, which means they exist already. Even acknowledging that an official version might necessitate more than this, it just shouldn't be a big lift, even relative to a very small number of users. If it is a big lift, then something else is very wrong inside Netflix. Netflix must have spent millions of dollars producing Bandersnatch. It was critically acclaimed. I can understand not making more—but not doing a modicum of work to keep it in their catalog?