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You might remember that over the past few years Netflix has been trying to get into the gaming space. They even have a special section dedicated to these games. And, news that will shock no one, nobody is playing them. Or, practically no one, if we’re being honest; I mean less than 1% of their users are, but I doubt that counts as a success. They did lose a bunch of subscribers this year, but they weren’t playing ’em, either.
To be honest, there’s likely a few reasons for this. For one, most of their subscribers probably don’t even realize they have games. They have some genuine developers, like Oxenfree‘s Night School Studio and Dungeon Boss‘ Boss Fight Entertainment, but that doesn’t matter if people can’t even find the section. Which is enough of a problem that there are articles detailing just how to find them. And it’s not exactly like Netflix really helps the average user, here, either. Guess they expected word of mouth to do most of the work.
And it’s not like the games in question are bad, either. Sure, there are some mobile/casual games there. But there’s also stuff like Moonlighter, as well as Into the Breach by FTL devs Subset Games, among others. So, at least they’re not the problem.
If you were to really boil it all down, the main problems are twofold (ignoring the possibility that most people sub to Netflix for their TV/Movie content):
- Users don’t get adequate notification about these games, and
- The process by which you actually play them is overly complicated
If they were able to fix those, they’d probably be doing much better than they are; maybe add a banner directing people to these games, or have a separate app dedicated to making them playable on any device you have Netflix on (right now, your only options are Apple or Android mobile devices). Just, you know, some way to streamline to process and actually advertise them rather than hiding all of that in a row way at the bottom of the app. Or maybe just find a way to make them playable through the app, somehow? Who knows.
They did have a fansite for it, made in December of 2021. But, aside from the fact that it’s hard to imagine anybody knew about it, there’s also the fact that none of those staffers were spared the staff bloodbath earlier this year.
For what it’s worth, Netflix plans to have 50 games available on the service by the end of 2022. Among them will be Telling Lies creator Sam Barlow’s next game, Immortality. Based on Netflix’s love for the crawl, walk, run method, their gaming section is still not able to stand, yet. A problem, given that games are often more time and labor intensive to make than movies or shows.
Source: Wired
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