Netflix working on over 80 games, will launch one new 'interactive narrative game' per month

Netflix is working on dozens of new games, but a good portion of them will be "interactive" experiences like Black Mirror's Bandersnatch and Bear Grylls' You vs Wild.

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In a bid to engage its core subscribers, Netflix has expanded into gaming, going so far as to acquire whole game studios and develop first-party titles for its service. Right now the gaming initiative is mostly limited to mobile devices, with Netflix even securing the immensely popular Grand Theft Auto franchise for release onto mobile, but the company has developed what it calls "interactive narrative experiences" that are playable on TVs--these vary from basic trivia games to choose-your-own-adventure scripted content.

Now the company has given a quick update on where its gaming plans currently stand. Netflix is making/securing over 80 games right now, but from the sound of it, the bulk of these titles should be the aforementioned interactive experiences that tie viewers to their favorite Netflix IPs.

In a recent call with investors, Netflix president Greg Peters explains the current plans for games:

Gaming is a big market. It's almost $150 billion ex[cluding] China and Russia, and not including ad revenue, which we aren't participating in, in our current model. And we're getting close to 3 years into our gaming initiative, and we're happy with the progress that we've seen.

We've had set ourselves pretty aggressive engagement growth targets. And we've met those, exceeded those in many cases. In 2023, we tripled that engagement. We're looking good in our engagement growth in '24, and we've set even more aggressive growth goals for '25 and '26.

But worth noting that, that engagement and that impact on our overall business at the current scale, it's still quite small. And it's also probably worth noting that the investment level in games relative to our overall content spend is also quite small. And we've calibrated the growth in investment with the growth in the business impact.

So we're being disciplined about how we scale that. So now obviously, the job is to continue to grow that engagement to the place where it has a material impact on the business.

I think you've seen this trajectory with us before, whether it's been a new content genre like unscripted or film or maybe getting the content mix right for a particular country, you can think about Japan or India, which we're now in an amazing place through the hard work of our teams there.

We continually iterate. We refine our programming based on the signals we get from our members. And if you look over several years with that model, we can make a huge amount of progress.

We've launched over 100 games so far. We've seen what works, what doesn't work. We're refining our program to do more of what is working with the 80-plus games that we currently have in development. And one of those things that really is working is connecting our members with games based on specific Netflix IP that they love.

And this is an area that we've been able to move in quickly in a particular space, which is interactive narrative games. These are easier to build. And we place those in a narrative hub that we call Netflix Stories.

Q2, we launched Virgin River and Perfect Match. Starting this month in July, we're going to launch about 1 new title per month into Netflix Stories, and this is amazing IP like Emily in Paris and Selling Sunset.

And we have lots more, including very different types of games yet to come in the quarters and years ahead.