Netflix lauds critically-panned FIFA World Cup video game
Netflix has lauded two of its latest video game releases and praised the impact of its kid-friendly ‘Netflix Playground’ platform.
As noted in its latest fiscal report, Netflix said FIFA World Cup: Launch Edition and Unhinged delivered its “most successful cloud game debuts.” It’s unclear what that means in terms of engagement, with Netflix neglecting to share gameplay hours.
FIFA, in particular, appears to have succeeded (in Netflix’s estimations) despite being branded a “massive missed opportunity” by FourFourTwo and a “modern hellscape” by Aftermath.
The streamer also noted that Netflix Playground, a dedicated application for child-friendly games, has grown significantly since launching earlier this year.
“Netflix Playground, our app for kids games, has experienced 3x growth in daily players since its launch in April, and has fueled growth in our kids mobile games engagement, which is up 600 percent year over year,” reads the company’s fiscal report. “While off a small base, these early signals give us increasing confidence that we are building a foundation with exciting future growth potential.”
In a follow-up earnings call, Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters was asked how Netflix’s video games are performing and how he expects that side of the business to evolve moving forward. Again, Peters failed to disclose concrete metrics, but said the company has been building “solid foundations” in the video game sector—despite having shuttered or divested from a number of internal studios in recent years.
“FIFA and Unhinged became our two most successful cloud game debuts, really solid numbers that put it in the top tier of game performance for us,” he explained. “Another big positive sign is that since last October, so eight months ago, when we really sort of scaled up this cloud initiative, monthly active players for cloud games have increased 11x and adoption is significantly ahead of that curve that we had for mobile games with even higher retention value. So we’re definitely excited about that and focused on scaling up cloud games.”
Peters said Netflix will continue to “calibrate and refine” its level of investment in the video game market, which he noted is currently “very small” relative to the company’s overall content spend.
