Netflix Partners with Night School Studio to Launch ‘Oxenfree II’ as Its First Video Game

During the beginning of 2021, Night School was seeking a collaboration. The studio’s first game, Oxenfree, achieved great success in 2016, and was followed by Afterparty in 2019 and Next Stop Nowhere, which was exclusively available on Apple Arcade in 2020. By 2021, co-founders Sean Krankel and Adam Hines had secured partnerships with major industry players such as Xbox, PlayStation, Valve, Nintendo, and Apple, establishing Night School as a highly regarded indie team.

“We actually talked to Netflix about just bringing some of our existing games,” Night School founder Sean Krankel said at Summer Game Fest, sitting with co-founder Adam Hines and lead developer Bryant Cannon at a small table behind the demo. hall.

Krankel said Night School was in no danger of collapsing or laying off staff in 2021. He and Hines had about 20 employees, were still dealing with the effects of the pandemic and were interested in bringing real stability to the studio. Maybe they’ll even find a buyer. They had a casual conversation with Netflix employee Bill Holmes — whom Krankel described as “the reason we have a Netflix button on our TV remote” — about potential publishing deals, nothing more.

“It’s like another normal conversation with any first party,” Krankel said. “And then one day he literally says, ‘Would you ever be interested in joining?’ And I’m like hum hum hum – yes. Totally.”

Night School was the first video game team to be purchased outright by Netflix, and the deal was announced on September 28, 2021. This was just two months after Netflix revealed that it had hired former EA executive Mike Verdun to lead the company’s formal push into video game publishing. and development, and plans to offer titles to subscribers on its streaming platform. Netflix has been messing around with games since 2017, offering mobile experiences and interactive streaming based on popular shows like Stranger Things and The Dark Crystal.

Netflix’s first foray into video games was Stranger Things, a mobile game that arrived in October 2017 and was developed by Texas studio BonusXP. It was well received, and Netflix and BonusXP released a sequel, Stranger Things 3: The Game, in addition to the series’ third season premiere in 2019.

If it feels like there was a weird gap between these releases, that’s because there was – but not in the way you might think. Throughout 2018, Telltale Games built an episodic narrative adventure (as usual) based on Stranger Things, marking the start of a larger partnership with Netflix. Meanwhile, Telltale tapped Night School to create a mobile game set above The Upside Down. Telltale and Night School previously collaborated on the 2016 Mr. Robot mobile title, Mr. Robot:1.51exfiltrati0n.

As reported by The Verge, Night School began work on a first-person narrative adventure in January 2018 that would feed directly into the larger platform game, and Krankel and Hines hired four new people on the project. According to studio members who spoke to The Verge, Telltale missed several milestone payments for Night School and was generally difficult to communicate with. And then in September 2018, Telltale was effectively shut down. Night School was left to float for a while until it became clear that their game was dead as well. Night School has had a Netflix-shaped ghost on its resume ever since.

By 2021, Krankel and Hines had seen the best and worst of what publishers had to offer, and Netflix was finally ready to admit its video game ambitions. The night school team had considered buyout offers from other companies for the previous few years, but “there was always something off,” Krankel said.

“After the first conversation I had with [Netflix’s] management team about this next thing, it was so exciting because they didn’t ask me, ‘Are you in the red?’ Or What’s going on in it?” It was more like, ‘What can we do to stop your team from realizing your dream?'”

Hines added: “Our biggest concern was the autonomy aspect. We’ve all worked in bigger studios before, and we’ve only seen and felt how long it takes to make decisions, how creative gets stifled because there are too many cooks in the kitchen. But after talking a lot with Netflix before we joined, we felt really at ease, like we were speaking the same language about making games.

Night School’s latest project is Oxenfree II, the hotly anticipated sequel coming to PlayStation 4, PS5, Steam, Switch and mobile via Netflix on July 12th. (There’s no drama behind Xbox’s exclusion, Krankel said: “Nothing happened, honestly; it’s just where we are in our development.”)

Night School has expanded the size of its team and moved into Netflix’s offices, and they can fly remote workers in as often as they need. One obvious benefit of the Netflix partnership with Oxenfree II is the inclusion of 32 languages in the release.

“It’s crazy,” Hines said at Summer Game Fest.

Lead developer Bryant Cannon agreed: “Especially in a game with hundreds of thousands of words. All of this is really exciting. I think the game will be better because we have this battery behind us.

Night School was the first acquisition in September 2021, but Netflix today owns six video game studios, including Alphabear developer Spry Fox and two internal teams in California and Finland. Netflix plans to expand into AAA development and previous mobile platforms; it currently has more than 50 games in its library, and the company plans to add 40 games by the end of 2023.

Netflix releases more games than it buys outright, including Spiritifarer, Into the Breach, Poinpy, and Kentucky Route Zero. One of the biggest names on that stack is Laya’s Horizon, the latest title from Alto’s Adventure and Alto’s Odyssey studio, Snowman. Laya’s Horizon is a peaceful wingsuit game set in a vast mountainside sandbox, exclusive to Netflix Games for Android and iOS devices.

Snowman began publishing iOS versions of Team Alto games in 2015 and 2018, followed by Apple Arcade-era exclusives Skate City and Where Cards Fall. Snowman developed and released Lucky Luna for Netflix in 2022, followed by Laya’s Horizon in May. Snowman games will eventually end up on several platforms, but Android has usually been an afterthought. Its last two projects landed on Android and iOS simultaneously thanks to Netflix.

In April, Snowman founder Ryan Cash told ReturnByte that the Netflix partnership had not been a hindrance to players. Yes, you need a Netflix account to play the games. But:

“Everybody I’ve had this conversation with has Netflix,” Cash said. “So they just get to play right away. Before it was either, I have to sell them a $5 game or I have to tell them, OK, it’s free, there are ads, but you can remove them if you want. Or it’s like, your you have to sign up for Apple Arcade, or you need an Xbox or whatever. So it’s been the most accessible way to let people know what I’m doing.”

Laya’s Horizon has no currency system, no microtransactions, no pop-ups or billboards advertising real-life products on the slopes of its virtual mountain – because Snowman doesn’t need those features to make the game profitable enough. The Netflix partnership took care of that aspect, and creative director Jason Medeiros didn’t have to implement the monetization in the actual game.

“I didn’t want any of that,” Medeiros said. “Because I mean, I liked games before all of this happened. So a platform like Netflix is irrelevant. Like, you don’t have to do that. It’s a breath of fresh air; we’re taking advantage of opportunities to make games this way.”

When I originally asked the Night School crew why they decided to buy Netflix, Krankel cut to the chase and said, “Why not stay independent?” And then he answered his question:

“A small number of teams are fine to continue for the next 10 years, but others have these peaks and valleys, and we were somewhere in between. We were in no danger of anything going sideways. But we were in a place where we would be where it would be cool to hook up with someone who has a similar vision and someone we could work with would want to de-risk.”

Joining the ownership of a massive media company comes with its own risks, but they are different concerns than those of operating completely independently, having to manage funding and paying salaries without a safety net. The challenge for indie studios is to join a parent company that can strike a healthy balance between support and autonomy, and Netflix has a proven track record in this area for film and television. Games are just the next frontier in entertainment streaming.

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