Unveiling *Flourishing World*: When Interactive Film and Television Moves Beyond the Beginner's Stage

Five days after launch, global sales of the "Empress Chapter" surpassed 1 million copies, exceeding 2 million copies 12 days post-release.

On June 30, 2026, total sales of the Flourishing Dynasty series exceeded 5 million copies, setting a global sales record for live-action interactive film and television works.

In Flourishing Dynasty, users take on the role of the female lead Wu Yuanzhao, entering the deep imperial court as a low-ranking talented lady, driving the plot forward through successive choices, and ultimately ascending to the peak of power.

This innovative design that combines an alternative life experience with interactive choices has attracted a large number of users.

In the current era where short videos dominate the attention economy, a work with a total runtime of approximately 1000 minutes that requires players to make choices to complete the experience proves one thing: the audience's desire for immersive long-form content has not faded, and they are simply waiting for a better way to "get lost in the story".

Recently, Wall Street CN · All-weather Technology conducted an interview with Demi, the chief producer of Flourishing Dynasty. From The Invisible Guardian to Flourishing Dynasty, the studio she leads, New One Studio, has been consistently focused on developing interactive film and television products.

Throughout the conversation, the word she repeatedly emphasized was "sense of immersion".

This is a feature that distinguishes interactive film and television from traditional film and television works, and Flourishing Dynasty may offer an exploration of whether it can become a new breakthrough opportunity for long-form dramas.

"Play out your own story"

This is not Demi's first time leading the production of an interactive film and television work.

As early as 2019, Demi led New One Studio to launch The Invisible Guardian, which was primarily based on high-definition live-action stills, with key scenes interspersed with live-action short films, paired with subtitles and soundtracks to create a cinematic feel. It became a representative work that went global and pioneered the domestic interactive film and television category.

Seven years later, New One Studio once again launched the interactive film and television work Flourishing Dynasty.

Completely different from the male-dominated user profile of the spy-themed The Invisible Guardian, the audience of Flourishing Dynasty is predominantly female.

Why did New One Studio choose to develop an interactive film and television work with a completely different theme and target audience?

"I've seen people online say that they've rewatched Empresses in the Palace so many times that the disc is almost worn out."

Demi believes that a palace-themed narrative centered on female growth may be a direction with strong market demand.

From entering the palace as a low-ranking talented lady to eventually ascending to the peak of power, this is a process of "overcoming adversity and achieving a life turnaround".

"When you passively watch this kind of experience, it's someone else's story. With us, it's your own experience," Demi pointed out. "Personal experience is the real competitive advantage. You are the protagonist of this story, and you need to overcome obstacles, explore, and take risks on your own to reach the final goal."

Demi gave a very specific example.

In the first part of Flourishing Dynasty, when Noble Consort Wei meets the newly arrived talented ladies for the first time, she asks if she can be given the peony hairpin.

"For a newcomer who has just entered the workplace, this sense of immersion is like: I finally get a chance to connect with an important figure, what should I do?" Many viewers naturally map this kind of scenario to their real lives.

"Sense of immersion" may sound simple, but to keep it consistent throughout a work of about 1000 minutes, every detail needs to be carefully polished.

The full series of Flourishing Dynasty has a script of about 300,000 words, and the entire development cycle from project initiation, filming to production exceeded three years.

Over these years, the team not only refined the story but also designed the logic behind every choice: Is the player's goal clear at this moment? Does she know what kind of expected plot development her interaction and choice will lead to?

These details determine whether the audience will be engaged enough to continue.

Demi noted: "The advantage of live-action filming is that the performance can be more nuanced. Actors need to have a deep understanding of the script and a passion for this category."

Therefore, the team selected the current cast from more than 2,000 audition materials.

On set, a single plot point usually has 2-4 options, so actors need to perform different scenarios, and the supporting NPC roles must also respond accordingly. All the creative teams, including costume, props, set design, and art, went through a process of "adapting while learning quickly".

The frequency of interaction is also an issue that requires precise planning during the scriptwriting phase.

The team began exploring the rhythm back in the The Invisible Guardian era. Due to its live-action comic-style, PPT-like presentation, the pace was faster, with an interaction approximately every two minutes.

Flourishing Dynasty is a full live-action video production, with an average of one interaction every three to four minutes. Sometimes a choice appears in less than a minute, but many segments are intentionally designed without interactions, allowing the audience to immerse themselves in watching a complete plot sequence.

How to achieve "seamless transition"

There are also challenges on the technical side.

On the one hand, an interactive film and television work may contain more than a thousand video clips, and each user interaction triggers a jump. It is necessary to minimize the visual sense of discontinuity and make the transitions between videos as smooth as possible.

On the other hand, the challenge is how to make the video files as small as possible while maintaining the same quality, resolution, and runtime.

According to Demi, this work was mainly developed using the Unity engine.

Unity, developed by Unity Technologies, is currently a game engine with a large global market share. Domestic games such as Honor of Kings are developed based on Unity.

In recent years, many AAA games pursuing extreme graphics have shifted to Unreal Engine, but Unity remains irreplaceable. Its core advantages lie in strong cross-platform compatibility, a low development threshold, and mature experience in lightweight optimization and performance improvement on mobile devices.

For the interactive film and television category, Unity's advantages in mobile video stream management, cross-platform compatibility, and lightweight optimization make it a "more suitable and better user experience-enhancing" technical solution.

Specifically, Flourishing Dynasty carries out in-depth customized optimization for video encoding, decoding, caching, and streaming loading at the Unity engine level, ensuring smooth transitions between jumps while compressing the size of each individual video clip to the minimum possible.

"We make the videos as small as possible without affecting image quality, so that users' experience is less restricted by network conditions," Demi said.

Judging from the actual product performance, the image quality of Flourishing Dynasty indeed maintains a high-definition standard comparable to high-quality traditional film and television works, and the loss caused by compression is almost imperceptible.

In addition, the team also specially developed a dedicated editor.

Typically, after the videos are filmed and cut into more than a thousand clips, they are handed over to developers to implement the functions. However, this places high demands on developers' understanding of the plot and product design logic.

With the editor, pre-production staff can configure the content directly, making it easy to verify whether the product matches the original design intent.

It is the careful refinement throughout the entire development process, from scriptwriting, filming to production, that ultimately led to the great success of Flourishing Dynasty.

However, looking at the sales performance, the second part of Flourishing Dynasty, the "Empress Chapter", significantly outperforms the first part, the "Mei Niang Chapter".

The "Mei Niang Chapter" was launched on September 9, 2025, and sold over a million copies in 12 days, while the "Empress Chapter" achieved the same milestone in only 5 days.

In this regard, Demi analyzed several reasons.

First, after the launch of the "Empress Chapter", audiences can purchase both parts together to experience a more complete storyline.

Second, the second part has a runtime of approximately 1000 minutes, twice that of the first part. The plot follows the protagonist's journey from returning to the imperial court after staying at the Temple of Grace to eventually becoming the empress, making the story much more substantial.

"From the inner palace to the outer court, the layers of growth experience continuously deepen, and the emotional bonds with other characters also grow stronger. This narrative tension gives more people a deeper sense of resonance. At the same time, the group character portrayal is also richer," Demi pointed out.

Breaking through the long-form drama slump

As early as 2018, Netflix launched Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, allowing global audiences to experience "deciding the plot direction by themselves" on streaming platforms.

The following year, domestic video platforms all entered the market. iQiyi released the world's first interactive video standard IVG, followed by Tencent Video and Youku.

In the same year, The Invisible Guardian topped the global sales chart on Steam, proving that audiences are willing to pay for high-quality interactive narratives;

From 2025 to the present, the Flourishing Dynasty series has opened up a broader female market. Flourishing Dynasty launched an H5 version on Tencent Video, which marks the first time an interactive film and television work has appeared on a traditional video platform.

But counting them all, there are indeed very few interactive film and television works that have achieved mainstream popularity since 2018.

This is largely related to the high filming costs. Live-action interactive film and television is a category with inherently high barriers. Interactivity means that every plot branch requires filming new footage, resulting in a volume of materials several times or even more than ten times that of ordinary dramas, which is a huge test for the team's script design, filming scheduling, and production capabilities.

For this reason, this type of work can only gain market traction through meticulous production. In addition, since the format is still new to the public, there are not many attempts in the market, and successful cases are naturally even more limited.

Although the number of hit works is limited, they have indeed increased the public's familiarity with this category.

Against the backdrop of the decline of long-form dramas, interactive film and television products carry more expectations from the industry. In recent years, with the fragmentation of user attention, the pacing and setup required for long-form drama narratives have encountered unprecedented challenges.

It is increasingly difficult to find breakout hits, and the entire long-form video industry is looking for new ways to enhance user immersion and interactive participation.

Interactive film and television is undoubtedly a major opportunity, and the maturity of AI technology is opening a new door for this high-cost category.

If the core bottleneck restricting the development of interactive film and television in the past was that "each additional branch doubles the filming cost", then AI's ability to reduce costs across the entire chain, from script generation, video production to post-synthesis, may fundamentally change this equation.

According to All-weather Technology, some large companies have already begun experimenting with AI full-process production, but their works have not been launched yet. Whether AI-generated characters can provide users with an immersive experience still needs further verification.

Envisioning interactive movies

Demi revealed two future directions that the team plans to continue exploring in the interview:

The first is interactive movies.

She envisioned an offline scenario: in a cinema, the audience votes through their mobile phones to decide the plot direction, and the story proceeds according to the option with the most votes, with each option having a corresponding percentage. This format is very suitable for adventure-themed stories that the entire audience can collaborate on to complete.

After the screening, the audience can review other branches online. The team has previously conducted a half-hour pioneering experiment.

The second direction is global expansion. Flourishing Dynasty has repeatedly topped the iOS paid app charts in many regions around the world, including South Korea and Singapore. At the recent creator meetup held in Seoul, South Korea: many users wrote to thank the production team, saying "this product accompanied her through the hardest time in her life and gave her renewed strength". Many users who failed to get tickets waited outside the venue and were reluctant to leave.

Demi remarked that "genuine emotions know no borders."

For the entire industry, interactive film and television is in the process of evolving into a "mass entertainment format".

But the challenges are equally real.

Cost is the biggest barrier, with the volume of materials several to ten times that of ordinary dramas. Can AI effectively reduce production costs while maintaining the nuanced expression of live-action filming? After multiple participants enter the market, will the industry see a focus on high-quality content or a new wave of homogenization?

These questions remain to be tested by time.

At the end of the interview, Demi told All-weather Technology:

"We are just getting started."

From 2018 to 2026, a portion of the audience is no longer satisfied with just "watching". They want to participate, make choices, and experience alternative lives.

This is an inherent desire, and it has finally found the right technology and content to fulfill it.

This article is from the WeChat public account "All-weather Technology" (ID: iawtmt), written by Zheng Minfang, and published with authorization from 36Kr.