Netflix has closed Squid Game: Unleashed developer Boss Fight Entertainment, according to former staff. News spread about the closure on Thursday, just days after Netflix's third quarter financial earnings call on Tuesday. Boss Fight was acquired by Netflix in 2022.
"Well, word has gotten around quickly about Boss Fight’s closure," co-founder and studio director David Rippy wrote in a post on LinkedIn. "Rough news, for sure, but I’m very grateful for the time we had at Netflix. We worked with some awesome people and made many games that I’m very proud of, including Squid Game: Unleashed which hit #1 in 26 countries." David Luehamm, Netflix game development director, suggested in his own Boss Fight goodbye post on LinkedIn that the studio had been working on something new: "I wish you could see what we had cooking," he wrote.
Boss Fight was founded in 2013 and has largely focused on mobile games. Its first game under Netflix was Dungeon Boss: Respawned, followed by Netflix Stories, which were visual novels based off Netflix shows; Money Heist: Ultimate Choice, another visual novel based off a Netflix show; and Squid Game: Unleashed, a battle royale game based the hit Netflix show that was released in December 2024.
Netflix did not provide a reply to a request for comment.
Boss Fight was the third independent game studio acquired by Netflix as it ramped up its ever-changing games strategy, following Oxenfree maker Night School Studio and mobile developer Next Games. Netflix bolstered its games strategy in 2022 by opening two studios in Finland and California, respectively, then buying Cozy Groze maker Spry Fox. Netflix closed the California studio in 2024; according to Game File, it was working on a triple A game. Around that time, Netflix shook up its games program's leadership, shifting roles to land with former Epic Games executive vice president Alain Tascan taking the helm as President of Games.
Netflix has spent the past several years hyping up the sorts of games Boss Fight had been making—specifically, Squid Game: Unleashed. In an earnings call days before Boss Fight's closure, Netflix co-CEO Gregory Peters used Squid Game: Unleashed as an example of its strategy for one of its several "verticals," which is centered on "immersive narrative games based on our own IP." The other verticals are games for kids, social games that play on the TV (like Boggle Party or Pictionary), and mainstream game ports like Grand Theft Auto. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is Netflix's most downloaded game, according to Sensor Tower data reported by Reuters.
"We're just starting to scratch the surface today," Peters said in the Tuesday earnings call. "We think there's much more we can ultimately do in this space. Yet we already see how this approach not only extends the audience's engagement with the story but it creates a synergy that reinforces both mediums, the interactive and the noninteractive side. It drives engagement, drives retention, and therefore, supports the business. So looking ahead, we're going to ramp our investment in this area judiciously based on demonstrating that we're ramping returns to the business, but we're extremely excited about the progress we've got ahead of us."
The strategy espoused Tuesday is the same that Tascan told The Verge in March. But Boss Fight's shuttering doesn't necessarily make sense within the scope of Netflix's plan: It seemed to be doing exactly what Netflix said—and says—it wants. The game is available on mobile to everyone, even people who aren’t Netflix subscribers, which could serve as a kind of promotion for the streamer’s exclusive content. It certainly “extends the audience's engagement with the story” of Netflix’s hit show, casting players as competitors in Squid Game’s fight to the death. By Netflix's count, Squid Game: Unleashed reached number one in the free action game category in more than 100 countries on the App Store charts. AppMagic estimated in early 2025 that Squid Game: Unleashed was downloaded more than 10 million times, making it the fifth most popular Netflix game. GTA: San Andreas, Storyteller, SpongeBob: Get Cooking, and Bloons TD fill out the top four, but Squid Game: Unleashed is the only one of these five games developed in-house by Netflix.
Peters spoke about Netflix's gaming business at the Bloomberg Screentime event in Los Angeles in October, likening the slow growth of that part of the business to Netflix's expansion into the Japanese market where, by Reuters' reporting, "only 2% of consumers knew the brand."
"We just did the 10th Anniversary in Japan ... but it took us a long time," Peters said at the event, as reported by Reuters. "The gaming situation is not dissimilar to that."
But people don't come to Netflix for games. It’s likely many people don't even know the company offers them—the disconnect between Netflix on your TV and its games on your phone doesn't necessarily work in favor of the company. Research company Omdia reported in June that Netflix’s games lineup increased user time spent by less than .5%, according to Reuters, which certainly doesn’t seem like a win for the extending audience engagement Peters spoke of in the earnings call. Netflix's strategy, as described on Tuesday in the financial earnings call, remains impossibly broad, even as Peters said the company was focusing its efforts on “a few identified verticals.”
Right now, it sounds like the social games played within the Netflix app, on TV screens, is what's stepping forward; Peters said that this holiday season Netflix is releasing a bunch of party games that play on the TV—Boggle Party, Pictionary Game Night, LEGO Party, Tetris—but are controlled by phones. That does make more sense than other games; people are already in the Netflix app, and games that are easy to get into and play are ultimately what users will see. But it doesn't solve the problem that most people, when opening Netflix, are looking for something to watch rather than play.
Netflix's failure to become a meaningful platform for games isn’t the fault of anyone at the studio level. And whether or not Squid Game: Unleashed succeeded by whatever metric the notoriously fickle company set for it, there’s no denying it fits within Netflix’s strategy around the show, which has seen multiple spinoffs and tie-ins. But Netflix clearly doesn’t know precisely what it wants games to do on its platform, a problem well above the remit of the developers at Boss Fight who’ve lost their jobs. As usual, when executives flounder, it’s workers who pay the price.
