Can Netflix become a gamepublishing powerhouse to match its ambitions in TV and film?

By Alex Spencer

Nobody could have been especially surprised by the news, in November 2021, that Netflix was officially launching its own videogame division. The company made its first attempt at a Stranger Things tie-in game back in 2017, after all, and has been experimenting with interactive video since Black Mirror spinoff Bandersnatch and a repurposed version of Telltale’s Minecraft: Story Mode hit the service in 2018. More recently it’s enjoyed success with TV adaptations of videogame series, most notably The Witcher. And so, coming at a time when Netflix was starting to shed subscribers (numbers dropped by around 1.2 million in the first half of 2022, though this since seems to have turned around), the attempt to push into a new medium makes sense. The sheer speed at which its new division has grown in the space of less than 18 months, though, has been considerably more surprising.

Today, Netflix Games comprises 450 people, including six in-house development studios, four of them acquired (Next Games, Boss Fight Entertainment, Night School Studio and Spry Fox) and two built from the ground up, in Helsinki and California. These studios are yet to bear fruit, but in the meantime a string of partnerships with thirdparty developers has kept the service well fed. At the time of writing, there are 55 games available through Netflix, with another 40 planned for release in 2023. Including those games, the company has greenlit a total of 70 thirdparty and 16 in-house titles yet to be released. Most of them remain under wraps – though we do know they include Night School’s Oxenfree II, a tie-in to Netflix’s Vikings: Valhalla series, and an Assassin’s Creed game from Ubisoft – but the current selection suggests we should expect a broad spread.

The acquisition of Night School Studios, in September 2021, was one of the first real signs of Netflix’s gaming ambitions. Oxenfree II (pictured) will be published this year.

The original Valiant Hearts was initially a PC and console release in 2014, coming to mobile a few months later. Sequel Coming Home, though, is a mobile exclusive (at least for now)

Immortality might be best experienced with a controller in hand, but we’ll always welcome one of 2022’s finest games being made available ‘free’ to millions of players

Its existing catalogue includes versions of games licensed from mobile powerhouse Gameloft, including Asphalt Xtreme and Country Friends, along with fresh mobile ports of indie darlings such as Immortality, Spiritfarer and Into The Breach – in the latter case, in an expanded form that apparently would never have existed without Netflix’s involvement. There are also what we might term ‘Netflix Originals’: titles such as Poinpy, Lucky Luna, Desta: The Memories Between and Ubisoft’s recent Valiant Hearts sequel that are only available with a Netflix subscription. Most successful of all are adaptations of Netflix’s own TV properties. According to analyst Omdia (working with figures from Sensor Tower), these accounted for a third of all downloads in Netflix Games’ first year, and the selection ranges from a number of Stranger Things games to a dating sim that accompanied the third season of celibacy-testing reality show Too Hot To Handle.

“OUR VISION IS TO BUILD A SELECTION OF GAMES TO SERVE ALL OF THE MEMBERS THAT WE HAVE”