Netflix: The gaming business has failed so far

According to Apptopia, an app analytics company, games have been downloaded a total of 23.3 million times and have an average of 1.7 million players per day. That’s less than 1% of Netflix’s 221 million subscribers, according to the English-language news portal. in one message Netflix told contributors last year, “We’re looking at gaming as another new content category for us, similar to our expansion into original movies, animation, and unrecorded TV.” The importance of games in Netflix’s overall strategy appears to have increased in recent months as the company aims to double its gaming offerings by 2022. This raises the question of whether this is due to also increased competition for users’ attention: Netflix has lost Second Quarter Nearly 1 million signups after the number of members actually fell by 200,000 in the first quarter.

According to cnbc.com, Greg Peters, chief operating officer of Netflix, says the company has spent “many months, and quite frankly, years” figuring out how games can keep customers loyal to the service and experimented with “a whole bunch of things”. Netflix’s plans seem to combine basic business with gaming fun: The current catalog of 24 apps covers a variety of genres and Netflix series, such as “Stranger Things: 1984.” By the end of the year, the catalog is set to grow to 50 games, including Queen’s Gambit Chess, based on another Netflix series (see the trailer above). It remains to be seen if gaming fans will bite at some point. So far, Netflix game download numbers lag far behind leading mobile games like Subway Surfers, Roblox and In Us, which each have more than 100 million downloads, according to Apptopia. However, downloads have slowly increased again since May 2022, after declining in December 2021.