The short answer? No. The long answer? It has been around for years already. 

Look at it this way, for some people out there, interactive content is pushing the boundaries of entertainment, for many others, that envelope was pushed in the 70s and broken in the early 2000s. All that’s really left, really, is to surpass what we have going on, and it is not a hard bet to take that we’ll surpass that in a couple of years too, if we haven’t got pretty close already. 

Mainstream television content is doing amazingly well these days. In the last two decades, there has been an uptick in terrific TV programming, from the Italian mob bosses in The Sopranos to the drug-making chemistry teacher in Breaking Bad to their more recent competitors found in the messy endings of Game of Thrones to the nostalgia driven Stranger Things. In short, there’s no dearth of quality entertainment. 

Hop online, and you’re met with a host of options, often overwhelming enough that you’re more likely to finish your meal before you pick something you actually want to watch. It’s either that or you go back to watching Friends or The Office for the umpteenth time.

More recently, Netflix came up with ‘Black Mirror: Bandersnatch’ in 2018. It isn’t to say that Netflix broke ground in creating something revolutionary in the television and film industries. Quite the opposite, in fact. The video game industry has been making such stories since 1974, starting with ‘Oregon Trail,’ a game about a group of settlers trying to make their way from Independence, Missouri to Willamette Valley, Oregon. The game presented players with numerous options and the freedom of choice, while reminding players that their actions had consequences. 

Before Netflix was even a thing, similar to Oregon Trail, a Czechoslovakian film by the name of ‘Kinoautomat’ came out in 1972, first premiering at Expo 67 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Interestingly, the first interactive film was not about the freedom and avenues of choice, instead, it was a satire on democracy and the illusion of options. 

The film industry didn’t take to it right away, perhaps no one expected them to either. However, as we approached the 80s and the 90s, gaming companies sat up and took notice. For a long time, games were single-minded affairs: go there, do this, kill that. Game developers realized that what people really enjoyed was having agency and being able to impact the narrative of the story they were playing out, and really, to be a part of the story. And so, game developers made games with branching storylines, changing narratives and stories that reacted to player decisions. By the early 2000s, action-adventure games like ‘Mass Effect,’ ‘The Witcher,’ ‘The Elder Scrolls’ and ‘Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic’ took gamers by storm, generating critical acclaim. 

The film and TV industries weren’t that far behind, but neither of them were creating content that people wanted to interact with. Back then, television was all about the story and what had you hooked was the journey of the characters you’d grown attached to. 

Even in the 2000s, video games weren’t a particularly large industry, but that’s changed. In 2020, just PC gaming alone had a market value of $37 billion with the mobile gaming industry worth nearly double of that, sitting at $77 billion. But these numbers are only a fraction of what over the top platforms are worth. In 2019, the market was valued at $121.61 billion and is projected to grow to $1,039.03 billion by 2027. 

More and more OTT, television and film companies are coming to realize that by making their stories more interactive, it allows them to tap into the video game market that previously developed as a niche on its own. Netflix’s ‘Bandersnatch’ wasn’t a coincidence, nor was last year’s ‘You vs Wild’ or this year’s  ‘Ranveer Vs Wild with Bear Grylls.’ Streaming giants are coming to realize that gamifying their platforms might not only be their best shot at upping engagement with their platforms, but also a chance to keep those user counts climbing and investors happy. They definitely won’t be taking over games anytime soon, but they will make a play to get a slice of that pie.