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For anyone who likes telly but hates impoverishment, one of the new realities of The Roaring Twenties is the elaborate and cyclical dance of Streaming Service Roulette. You’re constantly shuffling between streaming services, binning one off and then waiting for one to offer you a month’s free trial, making sure to set reminders on your phone to cancel them in three weeks time.
Now, though, Netflix has a new weapon in its arsenal to separate you from your cash: a library of mobile games included in your subscription which tie into some of its biggest hits, and which you can play on its app. There’s a chess game with artwork inspired by The Queen’s Gambit, for instance, and it launched with spin-offs from Squid Game and Stranger Things.
Well, it’s not a new weapon as such. Netflix has had games available to play on its app since 2021, but only now is it pushing tie-ins with some of its most popular titles. Stuff like the charmingly retro arcade tribute Stranger Things 3: The Game were novelties. It’s not like Netflix is suddenly turning into Rockstar, but those novelties are going to be a much more prominent part of what Netflix is from now on thanks to Netflix Stories, the app on which games like the upcoming Netflix Stories: Love is Blind tie in with upcoming releases offer a chance to play along in their own Love is Blind story. Money Heist and Virgin River will follow soon.
Leanne Loombe, vice president of external games at Netflix, told the BBC that it was an obvious next step. "Games are one of the biggest forms of entertainment out there today, so it really is just a natural extension for Netflix to include them as part of the subscription.
"The lines between the different ways we enjoy our entertainment are blurring. When you're in that moment, looking to sit and watch a movie or be more active and play a game, we want to make sure we have something for you.”
These will not be games for anyone who really likes proper games. Should you get stuck on a particularly tricky part of, say, Too Hot to Handle: Love is a Game, there’s a handy walkthrough on the Netflix site. (Incidentally, the look and art of Too Hot to Handle looks like a tribute to noted cartoon shagger Leisure Suit Larry.)
It’s an interesting pivot. There are plenty of reasons to think this might, at the very least, not quite be some kind of Prime-killing move. Have you ever genuinely enjoyed playing a tie-in game that wasn’t GoldenEye? I’ll save you the trouble: no, you haven’t.
Games are hard, and even harder to do as a streaming service. You’ll probably recall Google Stadia, which launched in November 2019 and was quietly shuttered in January this year. You’ll probably not recall Amazon’s tilt at the gaming market, the imaginatively titled Amazon Games, which also got binned off having made absolutely no dent whatsoever in the gaming consciousness. Remember Lost Ark? Remember Crucible? Again, I’ll save you a second’s rummaging around in the back of your brain: no, you do not. Nobody does.
So why bother? There’s a pointer in something else Loombe said: “Our goal is to have a game on the service for everyone. Not focus on making one big experience, but rather a selection of titles that members can choose to play.”
These aren’t ‘proper’ games; they’re more like Candy Crush or whatever you flip through instead of staring into space of an afternoon. Mobile games are dead cheap to do compared to those Stadia and Amazon Games tried, and they’re a handy way of leveraging the old intellectual property into some new service without too much fuss. Netflix’s games are the streaming age equivalent of the pencil topper in your box of Frosties: a nice little extra which entices you to hang around on their app for longer.
Is it something you can afford to ignore? Yes. Is it something you’ll probably forget about until it’s quietly binned off in three years’ time? Very likely. But there is something else here too, an 8-bit siren beeping away in the background. This is a time of flux for Netflix. The introduction of the new pricing structures and clampdown on password sharing has fundamentally shifted it away from what it once was. And there is, perhaps, an admission buried somewhere in here that Netflix knows it’s not really the place people go for zeitgeisty shows anymore.
It has one more season of Stranger Things and Sex Education. Its last massive new hit was Wednesday, which will presumably also do well when season two lands, but it’s hard to escape the feeling it’s being crowded out. Event series tend to be on Disney+ or come to NOW via HBO these days. Apple TV may find a big old post-Ted Lasso hit, but is still tootling along nicely with Silo and Bad Sisters.
So stepping sideways into the kind of entertainment which you mess about with while waiting for the Tube – the gaming equivalent of sticking The US Office on, again – feels about right for where Netflix finds itself. It had 238 million paid subscribers at the last count, which is by no means bad. But it’s not the all-conquering locus of pop culture it was, and it’s certainly the brand most associated with sticking something on because you’re too fried to subject yourself to something new. Somehow, playing chess on the toilet as a cartoon Anya Taylor-Joy blankly congratulates you on your moves feels like a decent summation of where the streamer is at: filling time, and hoping for the best.
