According to a story in the Washington Post, Netflix plans to provide roughly 50 mobile games to its customers by the end of the year.
Given the intense competition from other subscription services like HBO Max, Disney Plus, Apple+, Amazon Prime Video, Paramount+, and others, it’s part of the company’s overall strategy to become less reliant on film and TV programming in the future. Netflix disclosed a significant loss of customers last week for the first time in a decade, causing the company’s stock to plummet.
In early November, Netflix began selling mobile games. Night School (Oxenfree), Next Games (Stranger Things and The Walking Dead mobile adaptations), and Boss Fight Entertainment have all been bought by the firm (Dungeon Boss).
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings stated regarding the company’s gaming service during a recent investor call:
I’m particularly pleased with what the team has accomplished since it gives us a lot of flexibility in terms of providing interactive and gaming experiences to our members. We’ve had several notable accomplishments, which I’ll delegate to Greg to discuss. So, to be honest, I believe we’re expanding capacity faster than we did when we first started in cinema. That’s quite encouraging. So excited, and as you can see, we’ve been making little acquisitions to build up the know-how and creative chops needed to make some significant gains.
Both models are acceptable to us (licensing IP and doing M&A). However, I’d say that we’re quite excited about increasing our internal capacity. And we’re doing it both organically and through acquisition, which is an important part of our plan to be able to expand the ability to generate the games titles that we believe will truly unlock value for our members. And, because of the licensed titles we have, we’re learning more and more every day, which is beneficial.
According to COO Gregory Peters, though, Netflix is also looking to bolster its internal game development capacity:
But you can get a sense of where we’re aiming to go with this by looking at the announcement we just made with the launch of both a game and an animated series based on the Exploding Kittens IP. I’m not sure if you’ve heard of this card game, but it’s an entertaining physical card game that we’re adapting into an animated series and a game.
For aficionados of the IP, there will be some interplay between these two modes. But it’s just the first step on a lengthy road map we’re working on to see how we can make the film and series side, and then the interactive gaming experience, and the interplay between them, magnify the value that our members get from both.
So it’s a situation where 1 plus 1 equals 3 and then ideally 4 and eventually 5. So that’s the kind of long-term strategy we’re pursuing. And we believe that internal development capability will be critical in delivering on that promise because we can have those individuals focus on the opportunities we perceive.
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