The company has also learned from Google Stadia’s mistakes while expanding its user base with advertising and, thus, cheaper subscriptions.

Netflix is already in a better position than Google Stadia ever was: while the tech company only bought one studio, Netflix has three (Boss Fight Entertainment, Next Games, Night School Studio) and now has two newly created teams. The former executive producer of Overwatch will head the new studio, so he has a strong track record. Mike Verdu, Netflix’s VP of gaming, was not joking on TechCrunch Disrupt when he talked about strengthening their presence in the games industry:

“It’s a value add. We’re not asking you to subscribe to a console replacement. It’s a completely different business model. The hope is over time that it just becomes this very natural way to play games wherever you are,” Verdu said about entering the crowded cloud platform market (Amazon Luna, Xbox Cloud Gaming, PlayStation Plus Premium). He did not say whether they will have a unique controller like the ones Google Stadia and Amazon Luna has shown off. Verdu did say something about Stadia: “Stadia was a technical success. It was fun to play games on Stadia. It had some issues with the business model, sure.”

Netflix’s first ‘in-house’ game studio opened in the Finnish capital Helsinki in September, but now a team has been set up in Southern California. Chacko Sonny leads it. The former Overwatch executive producer left Activision Blizzard shortly after a sexual harassment scandal hit the company. It’s his first job in the games industry since then, and Verdu acknowledges Sonny’s knowledge: “He could have done anything, but he chose to come here. You don’t get people like that coming to your organisation to build the next big thing in gaming unless there’s a sense that we’re in it for the long haul and in it for the right reasons.”

Netflix is still focused on mobile games, and they have fourteen games in development, but Verdu said fifty-five are “in flight” (concepts, prototypes, that sort of thing), and the plan for the future is to have about half of their games be new, original IPs.

Source : PCGamer