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. <\/p>\n
The five games \u2014 which include versions of Boggle and Pictionary \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Consumers spend $140 billion a year on gaming, an amount that excludes Russian and Chinese markets and advertising revenue.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe think it\u2019s a real opportunity for us to try and earn a percentage of that over a period of time,\u201d Peters said at the event. <\/p>\n
Netflix announced its plans to expand into mobile gaming<\/a> in 2021, acquiring several game developers<\/a>, 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. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cToo Hot to Handle<\/a>\u201d and \u201cSquid Game<\/a>.\u201d <\/p>\n But so far the efforts have been mixed.<\/p>\n Last year, the gaming division was hit with layoffs<\/a>. And earlier this year, Mike Verdu, vice president of GenAI for games who was tasked with building the division, left the company<\/a>. <\/p>\n At the Bloomberg event on Wednesday night, Peters gave the company a B- on its gaming efforts.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of what we\u2019ve been doing is really just building the foundation,\u201d Peters said. \u201cWe\u2019ve been doing a lot of real hard plumbing work, but now we\u2019re getting to a really interesting place where we\u2019re going to deliver more of what our vision of what we should be doing in the space is.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Netflix on Wednesday night unveiled its first games for the TV, as the Los Gatos streamer aims to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":68596,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[54941,1656,3989,54938,3447,54944,1094,111,139,69,6729,54940,54942,145,2044,437,54943,54939,379],"class_list":{"0":"post-68595","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-boggle","9":"tag-company","10":"tag-effort","11":"tag-first-game","12":"tag-gaming","13":"tag-gaming-division","14":"tag-netflix","15":"tag-new-zealand","16":"tag-newzealand","17":"tag-nz","18":"tag-peters","19":"tag-pictionary-game","20":"tag-same-room","21":"tag-technology","22":"tag-time","23":"tag-tv","24":"tag-tv-game-slate","25":"tag-wednesday-night","26":"tag-year"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68595\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}