Following a few months of speculation and murmurings, Netflix has officially confirmed its move into the gaming sphere in its Q2 2021 earnings report. This doesn’t really come as much of a surprise after the company confirmed its hiring of Mike Verdu as vice president of game development.
Verdu has a respectable background when it comes to game development. Before the move to Netflix, he was working on Oculus titles over at Facebook and before that he was head of EA Mobile. That last post is especially useful now as, in the earnings report, Netflix explains that it will be focusing on mobile games initially.
“We view gaming as another new content category for us, similar to our expansion into original films, animation and unscripted TV. Games will be included in members’ Netflix subscription at no additional cost similar to films and series. Initially, we’ll be primarily focused on games for mobile devices.”
Don’t know about you but we’re happy to see “at no additional cost” mentioned.
“They all have smartphones, right?” – Netflix (probably)
In a video interview as a supplement to its latest earnings report, Netflix COO and CPO Greg Peters explained that it “will be a multi-year effort that we’re going to start relatively small.”
He went on to say that the company plans to focus on its original IPs to distinguish itself from other offerings. And then, as if reading the next thought on everyone’s mind Peters gave all of us hope of a better tomorrow when he said,
“We don’t have to think about ads, we don’t have to think about in-game purchases or other monetization, we don’t have to think about per-title purchases – really we can do what we’ve been doing on the movie and series side which is really just, hyper laser-focused(sic) on delivering the most entertaining game experiences that we can.”
All this sounds like pretty good news to us so far. Although there aren’t any solid dates to go off of just yet, it will be interesting to see what Netflix can do with their many bags of money and swathe of original IPs at its disposal.
