Netflix on Wednesday night unveiled its first games for the TV, as the Los Gatos streamer aims to gain a bigger share of the video game market.
The five games — which include versions of Boggle and Pictionary — are meant to be played on a TV in the same room with family and friends using their phones as controllers and are included in a regular Netflix subscription.
Other titles include LEGO Party!, Tetris Time Warp and social deduction game Party Crashers: Fool Your Friends. The company plans to roll out the games in the U.S. before the holidays.
Netflix co-Chief Executive Greg Peters announced the TV games slate at a Bloomberg Screentime media conference in Hollywood on Wednesday, citing the burgeoning market for gaming.
Consumers spend $140 billion a year on gaming, an amount that excludes Russian and Chinese markets and advertising revenue.
“We think it’s a real opportunity for us to try and earn a percentage of that over a period of time,” Peters said at the event.
Netflix announced its plans to expand into mobile gaming in 2021, acquiring several game developers, including Glendale-based Night School Studios over time. The company started out in mobile games and has been testing games for the TV since 2023.
This would be the first significant slate of TV games for Netflix, meant to be played from one to eight players in the same room on their TV.
In an effort to give subscribers more reasons to keep their subscriptions, Netflix has licensed and built mobile games, some of them based on such popular franchises as “Too Hot to Handle” and “Squid Game.”
But so far the efforts have been mixed.
Last year, the gaming division was hit with layoffs. And earlier this year, Mike Verdu, vice president of GenAI for games who was tasked with building the division, left the company.
At the Bloomberg event on Wednesday night, Peters gave the company a B- on its gaming efforts.
“A lot of what we’ve been doing is really just building the foundation,” Peters said. “We’ve been doing a lot of real hard plumbing work, but now we’re getting to a really interesting place where we’re going to deliver more of what our vision of what we should be doing in the space is.”
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