Netflix updated investors Thursday on its efforts to continue attracting subscribers to the streaming platform. It’s been about a year since the company started cracking down on password sharing, leading to a nice bump in paying users. But only so many freeloaders are left to convert. One of the platform’s longer-term strategies to drive growth is the video game business it jumped into in late 2021.
If you haven’t logged onto the Netflix app on a mobile device lately, you might not even know there are games. More than 80 of them now. And many are what you’d expect of a free mobile game, said freelance writer Ian Campbell, who’s tested a bunch of them.
“There was a game called Knittens, where you’re matching yarn to make hats for cats. You know, not superserious or superhighfalutin’ stuff,” Campbell said.
There are some games based on Netflix series like “Stranger Things.” And some licensed third-party games, including Grand Theft Auto and one called Kentucky Route Zero.
“It’s sort of like a magical realist road trip through the United States. But the story is very emotional and serious in a way that a lot of those early Netflix games are not,” Campbell said.
The expansion of higher-profile games last year helped drive an increase in downloads, according to data from Apptopia. But only a tiny fraction of Netflix subscribers are playing, said analyst David Cole at DFC Intelligence.
“I don’t think it would be fair to, at this point, to really assess it based on that,” said Cole.
He said three years in the video game world is nothing. It often takes longer to develop an original project. Netflix has bought several game studios, hired some big names and is piloting cloud gaming on TV and PC. But it’ll need more than that to go up against competitors like Sony, Microsoft and Apple, said Joost van Dreunen, who teaches the business of video games at New York University.
“This is always going to be a high-stakes table. What that’s going to cost to compete with these companies is tons of money,” said van Dreunen.
But Netflix is used to writing big checks for content to grow its audience, he added.
