VR leaders gathered for day two of the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last week. Many of the talks addressed techniques for dealing with a medium in which you present a story and a world to the ‘visitor,’ but you have limited control over how the visitor experiences it. The “Job Simulator” team created microstories bounded by story pinchpoints within a macrostory. The HBO “Westworld” VR and Baobab Studios teams rewarded visitors for taking actions that advance the story, but embedded triggers that advance the story when the visitor misses the cues. The “Trials on Tatooine” team learned that understanding and accommodating visitors with varying physical abilities can not only improve user experience design, but inform story development. Continue reading Game Developers Conference: What’s Next in VR Storytelling

The Digital Entertainment Group reports that, for the first time, subscription streaming has surpassed disc sales, further evidence that Hollywood may need to reconsider traditional windows for theatrical distribution. While total home entertainment spending increased 1.36 percent, “the $5.4 billion in disc sales fell well short of the $6.2 billion tabulated from SVOD providers like Netflix,” notes Variety. Subscription streaming jumped nearly 23 percent in 2016 (although figures do not include Amazon Prime), while disc sales dropped almost 10 percent. In another first, “spending on electronic-sell-through, or EST, which totaled just over $2 billion, was edged by VOD by just $67 million.” Continue reading DEG Report: Streaming Exceeds Disc Sales in Industry First

Netflix’s research shows that, after binge-watching a TV show, 61 percent of subscribers (accounting for 36 percent of all Netflix members) watch a movie, after nearly all of them (59 percent) take at least a one-day break. More granular research shows that the TV-movie pairings are often logical: Those who watched the “Pretty Little Liars” series next watched “Bring It On” and “Mean Girls,” and “Breaking Bad” viewers turned to “Full Metal Jacket” and “Pulp Fiction.” Horror series viewers, however, often turned to comedy. Continue reading Netflix Finds That TV Binge Viewing Often Followed by Movies

To understand why some movies bomb, Hollywood studio executives are increasingly focused on Rotten Tomatoes and other platforms that aggregate hundreds of views into a single score. This switch is a marked difference from past decades when high-profile movie critics at big newspapers were the most important judges of a movie’s merit. Those critics still exist, but primarily seem to hold sway with a small group of older viewers. Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic scores, meanwhile, show up in today’s search results and social media conversations. Continue reading Hollywood Studios Weigh Impact of Rotten Tomatoes Scores