Video games are experiencing a sweet moment, especially in Spain, where 18 million players and a turnover of more than 2,000 million euros made our country one of the most ‘gamers’ in Europe in 2022. According to a Gfk study, Roblox It is the favorite streaming platform for the little ones (between 4 and 15 years old), twitch of adolescents and young people (16 to 34 years old), and ‘Candy Crush’the game adults spend the most time on older than 45 years and the older than 65 years. Spanish ‘seniors’ spend more time playing with the famous colored balls –an average of nine hours a month– than on WhatsApp or Instagram.
A (pen) last revolution is looming over this panorama that aspires above all to seduce those who do not consider themselves ‘gamers’ and who probably don’t have a console in your house. And it comes hand in hand with Netflix, which is already present in many Spanish homes. The platform has been offering games for a long time, but now it has taken a new step, which consists of play from home on the television screen using the mobile phone as a ‘joystick’.
The limits of ‘cloud gaming’
And it is that Netflix Games has just announced your first steps in making games more accessible. His plan is that we can also enjoy them on TVs and through Netflix.com on the computer. Curiously, if we played them on TV we would use the mobile as a controllerafter downloading an app. The days of excess props in the living room to play video games could (begin to) be over. Some privileged subscribers from Canada and the United Kingdom are already testing the beta of this system by ‘streaming’.
It is about going outside the limits of iOS and Android to test the limits of ‘cloud gaming’, or game in the cloud, which allows users to play over the network without having to download and install games on any device. A kind of project that did not go well for Google: last September it announced the closure of Stadia, a video game streaming service that led it to create its own studio to create exclusive titles. But the great technology is not giving up and, according to various rumors and reports, is now working on Playables, an initiative that would allow users to play online through YouTube.
Do Netflix subscribers know that the platform is also a kind of video game service? Last year, less than 1% of its huge subscriber base were testing the suggestive offer of titles. Many do not know that the option exists; others know it, but forget. One of the reasons for this moderate popularity could be the certain complexity of access: it is not to enter the ‘app’ and start playing, but you have to 1) look for some games that are not obvious; 2) be redirected to the Apple or Android store; 3) wait for the game’s own ‘app’ to download, and 4) re-identify yourself on Netflix to be able to play.
From DVD to the future of the console
of almost modest DVD rental company by mailNetflix went omniscient streaming platform and major production company of series and cinema all over the world. But his ambitions go beyond a single range of entertainment. Now (or, well, now with special force) he wants to become video game forcean industry that appears to be their main threat in the competition for the planet’s eyeballs.
Already in 2017, the company wanted to calm the wait for the return of ‘Stranger things’ with a mobile video game with appropriately eighties graphics. At Christmas 2018, she was still exploring the far reaches of interactive entertainment with ‘Bandersnatch’, a special installment of ‘Black mirror’ in which the viewer could influence the course of the action. On a close line is ‘Kaleidoscope’recent series of robberies whose episodes can be seen in the order that one prefers without the global understanding of the story end up suffering too much.
Exploit the original series
It was, specifically, on November 2 from 2021 when Netflix officially announced its video game section, whose initial offer had as its main hooks ‘Stranger things: 1984’ (the game released in 2017) and another game based on the same phenomenon, ‘Stranger things 3: The game’. There was a clear commitment to the transmedia narrative, the one that unfolds through multiple platforms (films, video games, novels, comics); Also, a clear attempt to get the best possible revenue from their own successful franchises.
Betting not only on distribution, but also on the creation of video games from scratch, Netflix could also find intellectual properties to exploit in other formatsin the same way that he has done with other people’s video games such as ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ and ‘League of legends’, whose worlds are inspired, respectively, by his animated series ‘Cyberpunk: Edgerunners’ and ‘Arcane’both more than well received.
Your most important game
In September 2021Netflix had announced the acquisition of indie game studio Night School, known for his 2016 surprise hit ‘Oxenfree’, a groundbreaking point-and-click adventure about a teenage girl who tries to escape a mysterious island by using supernatural allies. Its newly released sequel, ‘Oxenfree II: Lost signals’available for PC, PlayStation, Switch and mobile, has received well-deserved praise in ‘The New York Times’ (“creepy, funny and complex emotions”) and ‘Guardian’ (“a slow-paced adventure that is refreshing”), among other reference media.
The union of the giant of ‘streaming’ with Night School seems more or less natural: both companies see themselves as creators of worlds, but, above all, storytellers. At the same time, Netflix does not want to risk its future in video games on a single card, a single style, a single ally. He has not stopped acquiring studios in the last two years, in addition to creating a couple of his own, one in Helsinki and another in California.
Amazon tried too
a decade ago, Amazon had already done the same by creating Amazon Game Studios, a project in which he usually invests about 500 million dollars a year, not always with satisfactory results. His successes are less known than his disappointments: from that failed response to ‘Fortnite’ called ‘Crucible’ to a massively multiplayer role-playing video game, ‘New World’, which as recently recalled by ‘The Washington Post’ it was abandoned by half of its users in a matter of two months. They have more luck as editors than creators: the role-playing game ‘Lost Ark’cooked by two South Korean studios, maintained a significant average number of players throughout 2022, according to SteamDB data.
Everything for everyone
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As in its catalog of series, movies and ‘reality shows’, often compared to a hypermarket (for better or for less), Netflix’s library of games has absolutely everything. There are titles for the casual game on the subway and others that are immersive experiences. There are easy ones and there are complicated ones. There are poetic ones (‘Laya’s horizon’an open-world adventure to hang out flying around an island) and there are tacky ones (those interactive versions of ‘Playing without fire’, the flirtation ‘reality’ of the house). You can make recipes in Bikini Bottom (‘SpongeBob: Cooking’) or learn to checkmate like Beth Harmon (‘Queen’s Gambit Chess’), as well as trying out the puzzles from ‘Cut the rope daily’, the first game in the catalog with a Barcelona designation of origin.
Today, its list of proposals reaches seventy titles. There are another seventy in development and by the end of 2023 they expect to have released forty new games. What doesn’t seem clear is that one of them is going to be some ambitious cross-platform game with Joseph Staten (one of the former bosses of the popular ‘Halo’ saga) as creative director. The great odysseys of the video game require their (long) time.