NET GAINS

Can Netflix become a game-publishing powerhouse to match its ambitions in TV and film?

- 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.