As major gaming companies make the move towards cloud gaming, it seems like Netflix will soon follow suit; or at least offer games in some way. According to a recent Bloomberg report citing "a person familiar with the situation", the streaming giant plans to offer video games within the next year. "The games will appear alongside current fare as a new programming genre -- similar to what Netflix did with documentaries or stand-up specials," reads the report. "The company doesn’t currently plan to charge extra for the content."

To forge ahead its video game industry ambitions, the report mentions how Netflix announced on Wednesday that Mike Verdu will join as vice president of game development. Verdu previously worked with Electronic Arts on mobile titles like Sims, Plants vs. Zombies and Star Wars. He also worked as chief creative officer for Zynga as well as served as Facebook’s vice president responsible to work with developers on bringing games and content to its Oculus VR headsets.

It is not clear whether Netflix will offer cloud-based gaming like Google Stadia or offer them to download for a monthly subscription fee on compatible systems. But given Netflix's availability across platforms, it's likely to follow a Stadia model and be the actual Netflix of games. In any case, these news have to be taken with a pinch of salt as Bloomberg's source asked not to be identified "because the deliberations are private".

SOURCE

 

[BORTZ]

Oh boy another service to play 3 year old mediocre Ubisoft game with maximum latency

 

[JuanMena]

Considering the hype Bloomberg created with the Switch Pro with 4K resolution... I'm expecting Netflix to do, in reality, something like:
BRICK GAME 9999-IN-1

 

[Deleted member 546149]

How the fuck are they gonna afford this?

 

[AamitMorthos]

I mean... I wouldn't be surprised if it's more interactive stories like how they did Minecraft story mode and that puss in boots show. They are games and it'll be easier for Netflix to do. But I also feel it'll be like onlive.

 

[Flame]

let me get the straight they cancelled shows which people like to put money in this crap?

 

[ertaboy356b]

They cancelled Messiah just so we can play Tetris: Latency Edition.

 

[kevin corms]

It seems nobody gets it, people don't really want to run their games server side. Its so niche its not worth even doing. What would really make sense is if the game files were accessed from server side, no install needed and local hardware still ran the game. This would be more like how video streaming and music streaming works. We might be a ways off before this is possible though.

 

[MaxToTheMax]

Wow what a stupid idea. It’s dumb enough to be something Netflix would do, though.

 

[Deleted member 471305]

If they come out with actual games then it's kinda exciting since Netflix is a service that most people already have. But that's assuming they will come "free" with the standard subscription and not be segregated to an alternate plan that no one will pay for.

But being real here, it will probably just be more point-and-click adventure games.

 

[osaka35]

They'll start small with things like plants vs zombies, and if that takes off, crank it up over time. Testing the water; Netflix is trying to diversify, I suppose. Preparing myself for farmville on my netflix.

 

[RichardTheKing]

Never have cared about Netflix (YouTube's more my jam); probably never will care about Netflix.

In one word:


MEH

 

[Teletron1]

They should bring back the interactive movie games but I’m sure it will probably be games for kids at first

 

[linuxares]

Sure, if it was like the Xbox Game Pass...

 

[Bladexdsl]

So seeing as how they've hired an ex head of EA in any capacity, this is locked in to never breaking past "mediocre" at it's absolute best.

 

[Deleted member 194275]

They should partner with Sony, as Playstation's exclusives would do amazing there.

All that over the shoulder, story telling with tons of cut-scenes would translate well.
(also Netflix love zombie stories a lot, just like Sony)

 

[subcon959]

Typical clickbait article just like the Switch Pro stuff. They are really desperate for subscriptions.

 

[The Catboy]

Oh, another Bloomberg rumor with an anonymous source

 

[FAST6191]

I can see Netflix being a viable threat here, though their internal censorship polices are also cause for alarm.

From where I sit the only way remote play works for any kind of real time game (chess is not exactly latency sensitive) is if the servers are reasonably local to the player owing to the whole speed of light thing. To dodge backbone* bandwidth requirements (civilised countries have unlimited bandwidth because they know your little home connection is not going to make a dent in their backbone bill) I believe Netflix already has quite a few somewhat local server farms and caching setups.

*for those unfamiliar your ISPs probably don't run their own fat pipes that go around the world or indeed across the country and that is subcontracted, usually with bandwidth costs. Such things being termed backbones for what are probably now obvious reasons. High bandwidth users, like Netflix, then also get to interact with them for more favourable terms or are thrown to the wolves by the ISPs and thus go for local setups where they can.

As Netflix is also hurting somewhat with companies withdrawing their IP to attempt their own services (Amazon prime sort of doing something, and coming off the back of a far more popular service that people continually buy, Disney plus probably being over inflated to almost the point of fraud but Disney know once the people buying cable die off their revenue basically vanishes so will be pushing it hard, ditto most other media companies), and their attempts at their own IP being somewhat hit and miss for the expense, as well as the rise of "buy one month a year, watch everything during that" I can also see them leaning into this hard enough to make it stick where others have seemingly done more of a pussyfoot approach.

 

[Bagel Le Stinky]

do good games and I'll care