My dentist, her love of Netflix shows, and curiosity about games are emblematic of the unique challenges and advantages Netflix faces on its journey to becoming a major video game company.
Three years after Netflix announced it was entering the games business, the world’s largest streaming platform has learned a lot about an entertainment business it barely knew, said Lianne Lumb, the company’s vice president of external games.
“We didn’t really have a good understanding of what games our members wanted to play, but now we have a much better understanding,” Lumbu told The Washington Post.
Lombe said Netflix learned three important things: recognizable intellectual property (established brands like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and SpongeBob Squarepants) remains ubiquitous across entertainment, Netflix’s IP is large enough to be included in desirable franchises, and so far, many of its 270 million subscribers prefer “casual” entertainment like a grab-and-go mobile experience.
Netflix doesn’t disclose how many of its members play video games, but Lombe pointed to statistics released by Sensor Tower in January that showed Netflix Game downloads grew 180% annually in 2023, with the company’s games downloaded roughly 81 million times across Apple and Google’s app stores.
Since launching in late 2021, Netflix has accumulated a significant number of games on the service. The Grand Theft Auto series needs no introduction, but the selection also includes acclaimed, sophisticated, story-driven games such as “Oxenfree” and “Kentucky Route Zero.” Critical favorites from independent studios, such as Supergiant Games (“Hades”) and Motion Twin (“Dead Cells”), complement the offerings from third-party companies. Games are a natural extension of Netflix’s goal to become the Internet’s one-stop entertainment shop, Lombe said.
Netflix has since become a game publisher in its own right, with two in-house studios and four acquisitions. As a new publisher, it provides production support and management, as well as quality assurance resources such as play testers — all costly endeavors for game studios. Loombe said Netflix wants to be a haven for smaller developers who have experience with mobile games but want to work beyond the demands of that market, which is dominated by free-to-play games. Rather than focusing on driving players to in-app purchases, developers can pursue narrative-driven games that aren’t designed to collect small fees from viewers.
“Not having ads or in-app purchases in our games is great for our members, but it’s also great for our developers because the free-to-play market is so tough right now,” Lombe said. “It’s not easy to compete in that space in the macro environment, so working with Netflix allows our developers to focus on the creativity of their games.”
One of the independent studios partnering with Netflix, Wonderstorm, founded in 2016 with the goal of being a transmedia creative outlet, produces the animated TV series “The Dragon Prince,” now in its sixth season. After years in development, its companion video game, the top-down action role-playing game “The Dragon Prince: Xadia,” will be released on app stores and Netflix on July 30.
“We saw how difficult it is for most companies to expand beyond their original core competencies, so from the start we designed Wonderstorm to be a ‘two-headed beast’ and set out to build a team that could create both a series and a game simultaneously within the same universe,” said Justin Santistevan, president and co-founder of Wonderstorm.
“A [game] “During the writing of season one, our engineers influenced the rules for primal and dark magic,” said Justin Richmond, co-founder of Wonderstorm and former director of the hit Sony PlayStation “Uncharted” series. “Netflix’s order for the first season gave the animated series a head start, during which we built an incredible game development team and began prototyping. Development on this version of the game began in earnest about four years ago, but it was something we had planned from the beginning.”
The studio’s “two-headed beast” approach included working with outside animation studio Bardel Entertainment in Vancouver (which employs hundreds of artists) to produce the show, while Wonderstorm handled development of the games, hiring talent from Blizzard Entertainment (Warcraft, Diablo), Riot Games (League of Legends) and Naughty Dog (The Last of Us, Uncharted). The show and the games share many resources, particularly writers.
“One of the Emmy-winning writers on the series is also the game’s lead creative designer and was previously a champion designer on League of Legends,” said Santistevan. (Like Lumbe, Wonderstorm’s co-founders previously worked at Riot Games.)
Incorporating video game experiences into a show can exponentially increase a TV show’s popularity, and vice versa. Video games are poised to replace comic books as the inspiration for big-budget Hollywood, with critical and commercial successes such as HBO’s “The Last of Us” and Prime Video’s “Fallout” film adaptation, and many more in the works. In fact, Netflix started the trend with “The Witcher,” increasing sales of the “Witcher 3: Wild Hunt” game by 554% after the show premiered in 2019. Netflix’s animated adaptations of “Arcane” and “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners” have also increased the profile of the games that inspired them.
Wonderstorm is keen to capitalise on the synergy with The Dragon Prince, which already has a tabletop game and graphic novels.
“The TV series and the games were built together from the ground up, which gave them the power to become key pillars of the worldview and authentic ways to experience the characters and settings,” Santistevan said.
Lombe said Netflix is still tweaking its algorithms to bring games to subscribers who are least familiar with the service, like dentists. This slow approach is intentional, she said.
“It’s a phased approach, with mobile definitely coming first,” she said, explaining why the game feed won’t show up on Netflix’s other platforms: Currently, when you click on a game in the Netflix feed on your phone, it takes you to the respective app store to download the game.
“For people like dentists who watch Netflix on TV, we’re not there yet, but our vision is that our games will be available wherever Netflix is,” Lombe said. “Once our cloud streaming technology is fully operational and fully available in all countries, people like dentists will be able to watch our games on TV, and that’s when we’ll be able to drive even more awareness.”