Netflix, the world’s largest streaming platform is paving way into a completely new genre. Gaming! Reportedly the streaming giant is starting small with mobile gaming. With the rise of competition from other streaming giants like HBO, Disney, Amazon Prime Video etc. It is only fair of Netflix to launch its own video game service. The entry into the world of gaming would pave the way for increasing subscriber counts and also the company a new system to earn revenue.
However Netflix is no stranger to games. Having produced a number of video games based shows like The Witcher and Minecraft: Story Mode only prove the point. Moreover, Netflix had also licensed third party developers to create games based on the popular show Stranger Things. With such a move Netflix is continuing its traditional strategy of making itself better.
“While we are continually evaluating opportunities, we don’t view any assets as ‘must-have’ and we haven’t yet found any large scale ones to be sufficiently compelling to act upon,” the company wrote in its shareholders letter. “In the race to entertain consumers around the world, we continue to compete for screen time with a broad set of firms like YouTube, Epic Games and TikTok (to name just a few). But, we are mostly competing with ourselves to improve our service as fast as we can.”
Greg Peters Netflix’s COO views gaming “an extension of the core entertainment offering that we’ve been focused on for the last 20 years.” He further says: “Just as we’ve continuously expanded our offering by adding new genres, unscripted, film, local-language programming, animation, on and on, we think we have an opportunity to add games to that offering and deliver more entertainment value to our members,” Netflix will be starting small i.e. with mobile gaming but the streaming giant will also consider developing it for other formats too.
While Netflix still hasn’t revealed a specific timeline for game releases. One can only predict that the subscription model will be similar to that of Apple Arcade, which is “a subscription based ad-free model with exclusive high end games.“