Netflix is building its own internal video game studio in Finland

By Cristina Alexander September 26, 2022

Netflix has announced that it is building an in-house mobile games studio for Netflix Games in Helsinki, Finland.

Amir Rahimi, Netflix’s VP of Games Studios, said in a press release Monday that Finland is the perfect place for Netflix Games to call home, as it is the birthplace of “some of the best game talent in the world,” such as Angry Birds creator Rovio and Next Games. Netflix acquired the latter studio earlier this year.

The internal games studio will be the fourth studio for Netflix, along with Next Games, Night School Studio, and Boss Fight Entertainment, and it will be led by former Zynga co-founder and manager Marko Lastikka. The company said that each studio will be tasked with developing games catering to different tastes. However, its studio and its games will take some time to build.

“It’s still early days, and we have much more work to do to deliver a great games experience on Netflix,” Rahimi said. “Creating a game can take years, so I’m proud to see how we’re steadily building the foundation of our games studios in our first year, and look forward to sharing what we produce in the coming years.”

Netflix Games launched last year in an effort to push into the mobile gaming market. Its games library has more than two dozen titles, including Poinpy, Before Your Eyes, Stranger Things: 1984, This Is A True Story, Into the Breach, and the League of Legends spin-off Hextech Mayhem. It aims to have 50 tiles by the end of the year.

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Cristina Alexander

Gaming/Mobile Writer

Cristina Alexander has been writing since 2014, from opining about pop culture on her personal blog in college to reporting…

Gaming

Video game voice actors are poised for a strike after successful SAG-AFTRA vote

The Last of Us 2 Ellie Gun

Hollywood is currently in the middle of a significant actors strike, and the same could potentially happen soon in the video game industry as well. SAG-AFTRA members voted to authorize a game actors strike, setting the stage for a potential disruption in the industry if current negotiations with publishers don't go according to plan.

The SAG-AFTRA union represents actors across all entertainment mediums, but the strike that's been active since July excluded the game industry. The game industry's separate contract with the actors' union is almost up, so SAG-AFTRA is in the heat of negotiations with companies like Activision Blizzard, Take-Two Interactive, and WB Games to create a better contract for its workers. If those negotiations fail, video game actors can go on strike to disrupt the game industry for failing to adequately meet their demands. A strike like that needs to be authorized by a majority of the union's members, though; thankfully for SAG-AFTRA, internal support was overwhelming.
A total of 34,687 SAG-AFTRA members cast ballots in a vote to authorize a strike, and 98.32% of them supported a strike authorization, according to a SAG-AFTRA press release. This doesn't mean video game actors are now on strike, just that they're willing to go on one if negotiations fail. SAG-AFTRA says these game studios "have refused to offer acceptable terms on some of the issues most critical to our members, including wages that keep up with inflation, protections around exploitative uses of artificial intelligence, and basic safety precautions," which is why a strike was organized.
SAG-AFTRA and these video game companies are in bargaining sessions between today and September 28, so we'll soon see what impact this successful strike authorization vote will have on the video game industry.

Gaming

Play Xbox Game Pass’ weirdest game before it leaves on September 30

weird west leaving game pass september 2023 art

Earlier this year, Arkane Studios disappointed on Xbox Game Pass with Redfall, a game that dropped much of the studio’s immersive sim expertise for an underbaked multiplayer adventure. But what if I told you that the person who founded Arkane and helped create series like Dishonored had left the studio prior to Redfall and made an excellent immersive sim that is also available on Xbox Game Pass?
Well, that actually happened, and the game in question is Weird West.
In March 2022, former Arkane Studios founder Raphaël Colantonio released Weird West under the newly formed WolfEye Studios. While it swaps out a third-person perspective for an isometric one, Weird West is a joyfully odd supernatural Western game that manages to tap into the immersive sim design philosophy that made many of the games Colantonio worked on excellent.
Unfortunately, Weird West is leaving Xbox Game Pass on September 30, so we recommend you give it a shot before it’s gone.
Embracing the weird
Surprisingly, there aren’t a lot of games set in the Wild West, and even fewer that lean into creepy, supernatural elements like Weird West does. The game’s world is full of supernatural cults, magic, and creatures like pigmen, zombies, and werewolves. Its story is told across five distinct campaigns, starting with one about a retired bounty hunter whose child is killed and husband kidnapped, setting her off on an adventure to get them back.
The individual stories of all five of Weird West’s playable characters are emotionally captivating and quite distinct from each other. That’s very noticeable as soon as you jump over to the second story, which follows a human turned into a Pigman. Still, it’s a living and reactive world, so decisions made and characters killed in an earlier character’s journey do have an impact on subsequent characters’ adventures; you can even find and recruit characters that you previously played as.

It’s here where Weird West’s immersive sim roots start to shine, as a lot of emergent narrative moments with impact feel crafted by the player. This carries over into gameplay, which is done from an isometric perspective. Like Arkane’s best games, there are always multiple solutions to any objective, and going in with guns blazing isn’t always the best option. Instead, players are encouraged to stealth around, sweet-talk characters, and even use some magical abilities if the playable character can learn them as they progress through a character’s journey.
With these more dynamic elements, the isometric perspective, and the narrative focus, Weird West can feel like as much of a CRPG as an immersive sim at times. As such, it might be an enjoyable follow-up to Baldur’s Gate 3 for players finally coming off that lengthy RPG. At the very least, if you enjoy games that emphasize player freedom and also find novel ways to make it influence the game’s broader narrative, then you’ll enjoy Weird West.
The game had some technical issues and rough edges when it was first released, so it has flown under the radar. Most of those have all been smoothed over by now, though. Post-launch updates have fixed most of the major bugs and improved the character progression, aiming, and companion and stealth systems by adding more depth and UI clarity to them. Weird West is in the best state it has ever been in, but still feels as distinct and strange as ever.

Gaming

Xbox has no plans to make its own handheld system, per leaked documents

The Logitech G Cloud Gaming Handheld sits on a stack of comics.

As part of the massive Xbox leak that came as part of its FTC trial, we got a look at Microsoft's road map for Xbox through 2030. One slide of this presentation outlines the kinds of hardware possible for Microsoft to make (and not make) itself. Most notably, Microsoft states in this document that making a dedicated Xbox handheld is "not in scope for first party."

Microsoft has been an avid supporter of devices like the Logitech G Cloud Gaming Handheld and ROG Ally with Xbox Cloud Gaming, but it was still quite surprising that the company never aimed to release a handheld that competed with those and Nintendo Switch itself. Now, we know that as far back as this May 2022 roadmap, Microsoft did not believe it currently has the resources and scope to make a Handheld.