Netflix games are coming — and the reasons are very Netflixian. (Hint: Numbers)
Netflix’s subscriber base has reportedly dropped by nearly half a million in the US.
Netflix reported its worst slowdown in subscriber growth in eight years as people emerge from their pandemic cocoons. But it has an answer to that: Video games. On Tuesday, July 20, 2021 the streaming giant announced plans to begin adding video games to its existing subscription plans at no extra cost. The confirmation of the long-anticipated expansion came in conjunction with the release of its latest earnings report.
Netflix revealed that its initial efforts in gaming will be focused on mobile games.
So…
What are we to think?
Is (No Man’s Sky) ‘NMS Mobile Netflix’ next?
Granted… ‘NMS the Game’ -or- ‘NMS the Movie’? — Both? 
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Interesting…
One thing that most people don’t realise is that Netflix is one hell of a software company. They have done a lot of groundwork for reactive programming, and their reliability engineering is something out of this world.
I don’t expect them to build up an in-house studio, though. They’ll probably be competing more with Steam, GoG, Epic et al than with Game studios. Not sure yet how that is going to work for a subscriber model exactly, though I guess Game Pass is a kind of precedent. What’s a bit weird though is that Netflix is not tied to a platform, and considering their current user base, tying themselves to one seems like an unlikely strategy.
So what I’d expect in the long run is a kind of platform-independant storefront, which is something that has never been done before. Even just “Mobile” already includes two platforms that have never been merged by any distributor. I wonder if it’ll work out for them…
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