Netflix unveiled its first games for television on Wednesday evening, as streamer Los Gatos aims to capture a larger share of the video game market.
All five games – which include versions of Boggle and Pictionary – are intended to be played on a TV in the same room with family and friends using their phones as controllers and are included in a standard Netflix subscription.
Other titles include LEGO Party!, Tetris Time Warp and the social deduction game Party Crashers: Fool Your Friends. The company plans to roll out the games in the United States before the holidays.
Netflix co-Chief Executive Officer Greg Peters announced the game show slate at a Bloomberg Screentime news conference in Hollywood on Wednesday, citing the booming gaming market.
Consumers spend $140 billion a year on games, an amount that excludes the Russian and Chinese markets as well as advertising revenue.
“We think it’s a real opportunity for us to try to earn a percentage of that amount over a period of time,” Peters said at the event.
Netflix has announced plans to expand into mobile gaming in 2021, acquiring several game developers over time, including Glendale-based Night School Studios. The company started in mobile games and has been testing games for TV since 2023.
It would be the first major lineup of game shows for Netflix, intended to be played by one to eight players in the same room on their televisions.
In an effort to give subscribers more reasons to keep their subscriptions, Netflix has licensed and created mobile games, some of them based on such popular franchises as “Too Hot to Handle” and “Squid Game.”
But so far, efforts have been mixed.
Last year, the gaming division was hit by layoffs. And earlier this year, Mike Verdu, GenAI’s vice president of gaming responsible for building the division, left the company.
At the Bloomberg event Wednesday evening, Peters gave the company a B- for its gaming efforts.
“A lot of what we’ve done is just laying the foundation,” Peters said. “We’ve done a lot of really hard plumbing work, but now we’re getting to a really interesting place where we’re going to give more of what our vision is for what we should be doing in the space.”
