It’s no secret that Netflix’s gaming ambitions haven’t exactly panned out. The streaming giant closed its AAA game development studio before it ever released anything, and has been slowly unwinding the rest of the indie studios it acquired. Is gaming still a part of Netflix’s future? Its co-CEO thinks so, though that will mostly mean cloud gaming.
Ted Sarandos was at Bloomberg‘s Screentime event this week, where he was asked whether (via GameSpot) he thinks Netflix will still be involved in games five years from now. Here was his answer:
I think so. Really, what’s exciting right now, and the mobile gaming was a gateway to cloud gaming, we were much more interested in what you could do on the TV using your phone as a remote. And remember, in a kind of post-console world, there’s going to be all kinds of opportunities for gaming on the television.
And that we want to be, you know, early investors in that. I like [gaming] for IP extension. I certainly like it for brand value for people who want to spend time on that screen gaming instead of watching, that we have an option for them.
What that sounds like is lower-effort, branded tie-in games for people who don’t traditionally game to mess around with. It does not sound like the type of narrative-driven immersive game that Oxenfree maker Night School Games, which Netflix owned, released over the summer in Unhinged. The studio was shut down months later, seemingly the final nail in the coffin for Netflix’s ambitions to spearhead higher-quality in-house gaming content development.
Sarandos was asked about that as well, and whether it would ever look to acquire one of the big game publishers, like a Take-Two or a piece of Xbox if Microsoft ever decided to spin it off. The Netflix co-CEO signaled that it has limited appetite for acquisitions right now.
“As you know, we have not been traditionally big buyers,” he explained. “The Warner Bros. [deal] notwithstanding, we’ve been builders from scratch.” Sarandos later added, “How we’re going to grow is primarily organic and we’ll look for opportunities that complement the business as we go. That’s for games too.”