I apologize. This is not about the movie (which I’ve heard is quite good), it’s about the flattening of offerings thatI’ve noticed across multiple services. In this case I would like to talk specifically about Youtube, Netflix, and a little bit of Facebook. Before I get going I would also like to make clear that I am not talking to the quality or legitimacy of any of these games.
I hope their creators were paid, and I hope they have a good working relationship with whichever platform they decide to publish on. These services continue to overlap in strange and funny ways. Everyone is getting snaps, games, and other loosely related content on their platform. I would like to speculate on the why of this behaviour.
I spend quite a bit of time on youtube. I use it as a podcast player, and don’t tend to interact much with its offerings in a visual context. I did decide to scroll through my homepage today just to see what kind of stuff they think I’d like and was surprised when I saw that they had games for play.
I’m using premium so I may have opted into this at some point. I assume it’s an experimental feature. It felt incredibly strange though. Why are there games, an active form of entertainment, being offered to me on an ostensibly passive platform. I’m not against it, just curious.
This reminds me of when people a long time ago (I dread that they possibly still do) played farmville on facebook. Or in more recent history Netflix Games.
Why is this happening? Why are all platforms branching out into other media offerings? I would like to explore this.