Netflix has been in the video game business for a while now, and for most of that time the company's presence has wavered between 'quiet surprise', 'irrelevant' and 'comedically inept' on the success scale.
They invested in the concept of having their own development studios. They also struck deals where they simply paid to provide excellent, standalone video games (like Civilization and GTA) made by other companies to Netflix subscribers, free of charge. Which nobody was playing, so after a studio closure in 2024, some AI slop announcements, another studio closure and a president's departure in 2025 they've since changed course.
Now the plan is to host games on Netflix itself, played via devices like phones, and this is also not working. The company's big, official FIFA game was a disaster, and performed so poorly that in a FIFA press release put out during the early stages of the World Cup, all they could muster was that it 'has an average player rating of 4.2/5', the kind of thing you say when the player numbers are really bad (otherwise you'd be boasting about player numbers!).
As for the rest of Netflix's games, things clearly aren't going any better. As part of the company's latest earnings report, Vice President of Finance, Corporate Development & Investor Relations Spencer Wang was directly asked how Netflix's games were performing, and all he could muster was a series of sentences like "FIFA and Unhinged became our 2 most successful cloud game debuts", "monthly active players for cloud games have increased 11x" , and that there's been "more engagement in kids mobile games, which is up 600% year-over-year". Again, you don't need me to tell you this, but if the actual player numbers were good, they would mention the numbers.
The numbers are bad because nobody wants this from Netflix! People open Netflix to watch a TV show or movie, that's what Netflix is, they do not want to open it to play a video game, and they especially don't want to play a video game through a TV platform where they have to use their phone as a controller. And even if you did want to play them, loads of people can't; the TCL TV I purchased brand new in 2025, for example, doesn't support it. Anyone who knows anything about video games could have told you these were all incredibly stupid ideas.
In earnings today Netflix said it was "scratching the surface" re games, just like it said in April 2026, January 2026, October 2025, and January 2025
— Riley MacLeod (@rcmacleod.bsky.social) July 17, 2026 at 1:02 PM
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Netflix made over $12 billion dollars in the last year. If they want to spend some of that money to make video games, there is no law against that, they would be far from the first entertainment company to try. But if they want to make successful video games, there are so many better and more proven ways than whatever the hell they keep flailing around trying to do.
Like… just using some of that money to pay people to make normal video games? I know you've tried and bailed on that idea, but you also never really committed to it properly; spreading $500 million out across a number of smaller projects, ones that could be released on actual gaming platforms but carry the Netflix name--and thus contribute to the company's bottom line--would surely generate at least some kind of interest (and revenue), probably enough to let you cite actual sales numbers in your fiscal results.
As someone who has lived through an "adults in the room" ownership nightmare in media, and can see exactly the same thought process in action here, it drives me mad! Some moron in a suit at Netflix thinks there needs to be synergy between the company's efforts, that a streaming app needs to have a value add, and that salary costs drag down revenue, so instead of doing the most obvious and proven thing imaginable--paying video game developers to make video games and release them in places people play video games--we get half-assed shit like that FIFA game, which I described as "a modern hellscape and an embarrassment to everyone involved".
It's especially maddening to consider that we're witnessing an extinction-level event rain down across most parts of the video game industry, where tens of thousands of talented and experienced developers are out of work, and Netflix (where things are not going great on TV either) are out here dicking around with the cheapest, dumbest shit imaginable. They could be paying thousands of these people a living wage to make very cool video games for them instead.
