After DVDs and streaming, Netflix gears up for what appears to be its third and most ambitious act: video games, with 67 in its library and 86 in development
Context & Ripple Effects
Netflix's gaming push has been building for two years before this piece: it first signaled the ambition in May 2021 by hunting for an executive to run an expansion, weighing an Apple Arcade-style bundle hired-executive search. By March 2023 it had shipped 55 titles since launching games in November 2021 and targeted 40 more that year 40-game launch plan. The Ringer's framing of games as a 'third act' after DVDs and streaming captures what those numbers add up to.
What came after confirms the direction: sources told the Wall Street Journal the slate was tilting toward games built on Netflix's own shows, including Squid Game and Wednesday, alongside discussions about a GTA title Squid Game and Wednesday adaptations, and by mid-2024 Netflix said most of its 80 in-development games were interactive narrative based on its IP, debuting one per month interactive-narrative pivot.
First-order effects
- Subscribers get a growing games catalog bundled into their existing membership at no extra cost — 67 titles live and 86 in development make games an engagement lever inside the subscription rather than a separate product.
- Netflix's internal teams and external partners now compete for slots on a slate that leadership is steering toward adaptations of its own shows, changing which pitches get greenlit.
Second-order effects
- The IP-first tilt turns Netflix's show catalog into a game-development pipeline, pressuring partner studios to pitch Squid Game- and Wednesday-style adaptations instead of original concepts.
- The volume targets eventually force consolidation: Netflix cut jobs from its internal games team and closed studios Night School Studio and Moonloot, concentrating output around IP-driven production.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, streaming subscriptions evolve into multi-format bundles where games serve as retention and discovery surfaces — distribution through the service rather than through hardware, the logic behind the Apple Arcade-style bundle Netflix weighed from the start.
The trend: Subscription video platforms are absorbing games into their existing memberships, converting owned IP into playable formats to defend engagement rather than to sell games standalone.