A few months ago Netflix made a rather startling revelation when it announced that it was going to diversify its business by venturing into the gaming market. They have since unveiled a couple of games in a few countries in Europe and initial results seem to suggest that they are not faring badly in the gaming market although it’s too early to tell when the move is a winner or not.
In the meantime, the company seems to be digging in and getting really serious about gaming. The streaming giant recently acquired a game developing company called Night School Studio. The deal was announced by Netflix yesterday on their news blog. Night School is a popular Indie game developing company whose most famous creation is Oxenfree. Basically, it’s a game version of Final Destination. You go to a remote island and everyone starts getting killed.
We’ll continue working with developers around the world and hiring the best talent in the industry to deliver a great collection of exclusive games
Mike Verdu VP of game development at Night School
The two will work together to create Oxenfree 2 which will be offered via Netflix. Already I am beginning to sense the method to Netflix game venturing madness. There is a link between the games they are going to be developing and the content they will be airing. I suspected as much when they made the announcement but this is confirmation that Netflix is serious about venturing into games. Imagine being able to play the Witcher right after watching all the episodes. It makes for a much richer entertainment experience.
More importantly for Netflix, it will likely in the end or even in the beginning lead to the company being rewarded by more subscribers. It’s a metric that the company and its investors seem to be obsessed about. They also seem to have a strategy of working with Indie developers instead of trying to develop the games in-house. That mirrors their content strategy with movies and T.V shows and will make it easier to release lots of titles in a relatively short amount of time.
They can even engage Indie developers to create games for some of the original titles they already have in their portfolio. We have already seen what they did with Stranger Things which is one of the titles for which there is already a game.
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