Less than 1% of Netflix subscribers are playing the service’s games

By Cristina Alexander August 8, 2022

Netflix has launched a slew of mobile games since it announced its push into gaming last year, but most subscribers aren’t playing them yet.

According to data from app analytics company Apptopia (via CNBC), Netflix’s games have been downloaded 23.3 million times and are played by 1.7 million subscribers daily. That’s less than 1 percent of the 221 million people subscribed to Netflix worldwide.

This report comes as Netflix faces growing competition from other streaming platforms to retain subscribers. Netflix lost over a million subscribers in the second quarter after reporting a loss of 200,000 subscribers during the first quarter in April — its first decline in over a decade.

When Netflix Games launched in November 2021, it had a small offering of five games, including Stranger Things: 1984, Stranger Things 3: The Game, Shooting Hoops, Card Blast, and Teeter Up. The games catalog has since increased to over two dozen titles, including Poinpy, This is a True Story, Exploding Kittens: The Game, the League of Legends spinoff Hextech Mayhem, Into the Breach, and Before Your Eyes.

Netflix is currently working to add more games to its catalog, including The Queen’s Gambit chess game, a Shadow and Bone RPG, a “choose your own adventure” called Too Hot to Handle, and a heist game based on La Casa de Papel (or Money Heist). It aims to have 50 games on the platform by the end of the year. To hit that goal, it has acquired three indie game studios, including Boss Fight, Next Games (which already created games based on Stranger Things and The Walking Dead), and Night School Studio, the creator of Oxenfree.

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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

PlayStation Portal: release date, price, specs, and more

The PlayStation Portal alongside Sony's other new headsets.

After being teased under the code name Project Q, we now have a clear picture of just what Sony's latest hardware will be. Officially called the PlayStation Portal, this curious device has many gamers a bit confused about what it is, what it can do, and who it is for. Is it a new handheld, a streaming device, or something in-between? With all the information finally available, we are here to clear up any confusion about what this latest piece of PlayStation hardware really is.
Price
The PlayStation Portal will retail for $200 at launch.
Release date
You can expect the PlayStation Portal to arrive later this year, on November 15, 2023.
Specs

The most important thing to know about the PlayStation Portal is what it really is. This is not a dedicated handheld like the PSP or Vita that you can play games on natively, but instead can only be used as a companion to your PlayStation 5. This device is only intended to stream games from your main console to the screen via Wi-Fi for remote play. Games cannot be played locally on the device, meaning it cannot function without connecting to your PS5. However, you do not need to be on the same network as your PS5. As long as your PS5 is in rest mode and connected to Wi-Fi, you can connect to it through another Wi-Fi network to play, provided the connection is strong enough.

Gaming

PlayStation Portal misunderstands remote play and cloud gaming’s appeal

A PlayStation Portal boots up.

Sony finally revealed more details about its upcoming handheld, now called PlayStation Portal, but these announcements have soured my opinion on the device rather than hyped me up for it. I enjoy cloud gaming and have used a variety of services like Google Stadia, Amazon Luna, and Xbox Cloud Gaming - across my phone and even dedicated devices like the Logitech G Cloud Gaming Handheld. Because of that, I was really excited to see what PlayStation could do as it entered the space. Unfortunately, some specific exclusions from PlayStation Portal's functionality that make it more of a remote-play device rather than a cloud gaming handheld indicate that Sony has a fundamental misunderstanding about what people would want out of a PlayStation game streaming handheld.

Namely, the device's positioning as primarily a "remote play dedicated device" and the exclusion of PlayStation Plus Premium cloud gaming compatibility drastically shrinks the number of reasons people should pick the device up. Cloud gaming and devices built around it have been around long enough to show that an inclusive approach to the number of services, games, and kinds of game streaming available is vital to success, and for a $200 handheld, PlayStation Portal seems like it's excluding way too much.
Narrowing its appeal
Remote play differs from what's more ubiquitously referred to as cloud gaming players are running the games on their own consoles rather than a third-party console or server. Still, it's a form of streaming games over a Wi-Fi connection, typically through an app on a phone or device like the Logitech G Cloud Gaming Handheld. That means you'll have to stick around your own home to use the PlayStation Portal, and its game library is limited to whatever the user owns on the console. That's limiting (it's like if Steam Deck only ran Steam Link) but does have some use cases. Still, it doesn't necessarily feel like it warrants a dedicated $200 device over a phone and a nice mobile controller like the Razer Kishi V2 or Backbone One - PlayStation Edition; haptic feedback and adaptive triggers only go so far.

Gaming

More Black video game heroes shouldn’t be a fantasy

Final Fantasy 16's main cast standing together.

As a Black youth back in the early 2000s, I became an avid gamer after being introduced to Sonic the Hedgehog on the Sega Genesis. From there, I fell in love with nearly every game under the sun, discovering as many as I could. But it was my uncle who would really change my life forever when he showed me my first RPG in Final Fantasy 7 and bought me Kingdom Hearts. So imagine my excitement when I got to see Black characters like Barret on-screen in a heroic RPG. Sure, I’d seen Black characters in games before thanks to the beat 'em up and fighting game genres, but I was thrilled to see them in a genre where the closest thing to people of my complexion was the Black Mage. It opened my young mind to how invisible I was in so much of gaming.

Flash forward to today and you might understand why people like me were so disappointed when Final Fantasy XVI producer Naoki Yoshida argued that the RPG didn't include Black characters for the sake of maintaining "realism" in its European-inspired setting. It felt like a poorly argued step back, though it's not exactly an outlier in the broader industry. While video games have continued to evolve and open themselves up to new audiences through more diverse representation, many of today's biggest games from all around the world still tend to treat white male heroes as the "default" option.