Alain Tascan was a little more blunt than that (pairing Sony’s next-generation console with a fairly young age group…).

Tascan, who is in charge of Netflix’s expansion into the gaming industry, said he doesn’t think console games are the future. Netflix has been making a modest push into games for a few years, hiring experienced talent and giving millions of users access to some titles on the Netflix app. But those experiences have mostly been smaller, mobile-style titles, not console-sized blockbusters.

“When it comes to the console, we started to look at the future where the platform is agnostic. Look at the younger generation. Do eight- and ten-year-olds dream of owning a PlayStation 6? I am not sure. They want to interact with any digital screen, whatever it is, wherever it is, even in the car. When you think about a console, you think about high definition, you think about the controller… If we look at that older model, I think it will hold us back,” Tascan told The Game Business.

In October, Netflix shut down its AAA studio (Team Blue) after hiring a number of veteran developers over the past few years, including former Overwatch executive producer Chacko Sonny, Halo veteran Joseph Staten, and former Sony Santa Monica art director Raf Grassetti. All three reportedly left Netflix following the studio’s closure. In November, the company removed 20 of its 24 interactive experiences, which played out as branching stories where players made choices to take the story in different directions.

Then, in February, we learned that Netflix had laid off several employees from Night School Studios, known for Oxenfree. This team was acquired by Netflix back in 2021 (and was the company’s first such move). Despite this, it seems that Netflix is still committed to having games as part of its service. In December, it released the mobile game Squid: Unleashed, and recently announced that it would be bringing the WWE 2K series to mobile as a Netflix exclusive.

It just seems a little hard to follow at the moment.

Source: VGC