Netflix continues to ramp up its video gaming ambitions, unveiling plans to release 40 more games this year.
Since launching Netflix Games in November 2021, the streamer has released 55 games. Furthermore, Netflix said it’s developing 70 games with its partners, not including 16 games that are currently being developed by the company’s in-house game studios.
With this announcement, Netflix showcased a few of its upcoming games. The most recent addition is “Highwater,” in which players must navigate a climate catastrophe on Earth. “Terra Nil,” which will be released on March 28, is described a reverse city-builder, where the user must restore the ecosystem of a dead landscape.
Netflix also revealed a few other games currently in development. The first is a sequel for “Too Hot to Handle: Love is a Game,” based on Netflix’s unscripted dating show by the same name. Ubisoft’s “Mighty Quest: Rogue Palace,” which is scheduled for release in April, is the second of three exclusive games the studio is making for Netflix.
The ”Monument Valley” series, first released in 2014, will be making its way to Netflix in 2024. And finally, the streamer teased it’s got a yet-unnamed game in the works that’s based on an upcoming Netflix release, though it’s “still very early in development.”
Netflix in the past couple of years has built up its gaming portfolio. The company acquired Night School Studio in September 2021, then last March proceeded to purchase Finnish gaming studio Next Games and Texas-based developer Boss Fight Entertainment.
Going one step further in its video game foray, Netflix last fall established its first in-house gaming studio headquartered in Helsinki, Finland as well as another internal studio in Southern California. All told, Netflix now has five gaming studios in its arsenal.
Netflix execs have flagged gaming as a “top level priority” and that the company is “very enthusiastic about building internal capacity” in addition to owning and licensing IP.
The streamer hasn’t provided a number of how many subscribers download its games, but Apptopia data from October indicated Netflix mobile games have been installed at least 34.1 million times worldwide.
Apptopia also found daily active users for these games combined averaged 1.63 million users over the past 30 days. However, that number pales to Netflix’s overall subscriber count, which amounted to 231 million paid subscribers at the end of 2022.
A survey conducted by Statista last year suggests Netflix’s gaming unit still has room to grow in terms of usage. Statista noted Netflix Games has a brand awareness of 66% in the U.S., but only 22% of domestic video game subscription users said they use the service.