Do You Think Netflix Will Be Successful With Their Expansion Into Video Games?

[Herbert]

Netflix has hired former video game executive Mike Verdu to lead their new game development department. 

I have my doubts about this venture but I guess we'll just have to wait and see. The video game industry has become so huge that everyone wants a slice of the pie.

If Netflix starts developing some interactive movies with branching storylines depending on player choice, I think that could be really interesting and its possible their could be a niche audience for that especially with Netflix's audience base of over 200 million subscribers.

But I suspect that Netflix will attempt to offer something more akin to Xbox Gamepass and that's where I foresee some complications.

Based on Google Stadia's performance, it seems pretty much unlikely that people will use your platform if you don't have any must play games available. Netflix is probably thinking that since they already have a huge userbase  that some of those users will naturally decide to try out their games platform(I'm going with the assumption that their games platform will have a separate subscription then the current movie platform).

I think Netflix is going to need some high quality games to get players to come and then to get players to stay and continue using the service. Microsoft has made a huge investment into its first party studios as they finally recognized the need to deliver high quality first party games. You can't simply rely on third party studios to deliver the games.

So based on the current situation with the limited amount of information publicly released, I have a hard time seeing Netflix being successful. Microsoft right now is #1 when it comes to providing games for a monthly fee. With Xcloud you can make the argument that they are #1 in terms of games streaming already. On top of that even though Google Stadia has closed. Amazon has its cloud streaming platform in development called Amazon Luna which will be a direct competitor as well.

Microsoft has a strong first mover advantage but even more it has the studios and it has the developer talent. They are going to be able to put out a ton of gaming content with their 20+ studios that are all already deep in development.

Netflix is going to have to release a lot more information and announce a lot more moves to convince people that they ae serious about moving into game streaming and really competing.

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