Netflix acquires night school studio.What’s next

Last week, Netflix Announce It bought the night school studio, the developer No cattle Series and After the partyIn a recent interview, we had a brief conversation with Sean Krankel, co-founder and studio director of Night School, about the new partnership and what it means for the studio’s near and long-term future.

Night School is currently developing Oxenfree II: Lost Signals, which is scheduled to be released sometime next year. As Crankel told us, the Netflix acquisition has no impact on the development of the game; Oxenfree 2 is still in progress. Despite having a studio now, Netflix is ​​not involved in this particular project-MWM Interactive is releasing Oxenfree II.

But after the release of Oxenfree II, Netflix will take over as the publisher of Night School. Night School is the first studio acquired by the streaming media giant during its foray into the gaming industry. Back to July, Bloomberg Report Netflix hired Mike Verdu to help lead its video game division. Before joining Netflix, Verdu served as an executive at EA and Facebook, the former responsible for mobile games, and the latter responsible for Oculus developer relations. As Netflix develops its gaming platform, Krankel stated that Night School will work with the company to help shape the future.

“It’s really-I hate to overuse the word organic, but it’s just organically combined,” Crankl told us. “We are not going around, the more we talk to them, the more our vision aligns with what we like to do and where they want to go through the platform.”

“I think my view on acquisitions is more like, what will happen in the future?” Crankel said. “Where are we going? This is what they are developing the platform. We can help them form something with them. We will find out our next concept in the future. But for now, yes, Oxenfree II is Our main focus, they [Netflix] Don’t even want to change direction at all. “

This acquisition is not the first time the two companies have participated in each other.As edge 2019 report, Citing anonymous sources from Night School and Telltale Games, Night School is developing a video game adapted from a popular Netflix series that has never been announced. Strange things. Telltale Games is the publisher of the game, but when the studio Closed in 2018 (Being Effective resurrection End of 2019), as a source said edge, The game “just evaporated” and was never officially canceled.

According to Crankel, the current deal with Netflix and the previous collaboration with Telltale have been completely cancelled. Strange things game. Although he did confirm the validity of the report and the development of the game, he told us that the two incidents were “completely unrelated.”

“I think even though we started talking to them recently — basically, we’ve been talking to them on various projects for about six or seven months — but I don’t even know if they know we’re making one Strange things Games,” Crankel said with a smile. “So yes, that’s for sure-that’s when we work directly with Telltale, so we don’t have so many direct contacts. ”

The games resulting from the new partnership between Night School and Netflix remains to be seen. However, Crankel told us that in the pre-acquisition conversation, the two sides were in sync. The night school is praised for its adventure-type works, especially how it handles natural dialogue and branch storytelling. As developers continue to expand on these ideas, Krankel tells us that Netflix fully supports Night School’s vision.

“It really evolved organically from our talking about the vision of the game and wanting to make games that people can interact with. [stories] In a new way,” Crankel said. “We don’t want to template what we do, but we want to continue to advance new story ideas or new mechanism ideas, all of which are like,’check, check, check. When we talked to Netflix, it sounded great to us. “

Night School Studio’s next game, Oxenfree II, is scheduled to be released on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and PC in 2022.