Netflix Gaming. A Mystery Worthy of the Upside Down.

Netflix Gaming. A Mystery Worthy of the Upside Down.

These days, big business wants a piece of every pie. Let’s take Amazon, for example. Jeff Bezos’ monolithic corporation owns comic book store ComiXology, as well as IMDb, Goodreads, Twitch, shoe store Zappos, and even diapers.com, which it has since enfolded into the regular Amazon web store. That’s to say nothing of its own-branded properties like Prime Video and Amazon Music.

Stranger Things

This appetite for just about everything runs right through this new(ish) breed of mega-capitalism. Google, Samsung, and Apple have eaten up all the competition they can stomach, acquiring ideas and products they liked the look of and re-releasing them back onto the marketplace. After all, the UK newspaper https://www.theguardian.com reveals that the only reason Facebook has a virtual reality platform is that it bought Oculus back in 2014.

Netflix, currently 9th on the Most Admired Companies list at https://www.forbes.com, has a suitably large amount of support for innovation from its userbase, yet the company seems to lack the same voracious hunger for acquisitions as all the previous companies. To date, Netflix has only bought five companies, including the owner of the Roald Dahl catalogue of stories and the Millarworld comic book franchise.

That’s not to say that it hasn’t been working on its own thing. Netflix has a range of games that come free on mobile with every subscription to its streaming service. Why? The two Stranger Things games make some semblance of sense as a way to promote the fantasy epic but the addition of several unique IPs doesn’t seem to play well with what many people might consider Netflix’s reason for being.

RocketRide Games

Of course, mobile is very much a gateway technology. Companies operating in the space can significantly increase the size of their audience with very little effort on their end, something that has become a bit of a prized outcome for casino operators and similar entertainment websites. The Mr Green website at https://www.mrgreen.com/ca/ notes that its app now offers the full functionality of the website.

Mr Green has even been able to incorporate live casino tables, which utilise streaming technology to provide a more immersive way of playing. In comparison, Netflix hasn’t done anything particularly fancy yet. However, a new partnership with the Montreal-based RocketRide Games suggests that the media company really does have designs on the mobile gaming market, which is currently dominated by developers like King and Zynga.

Once again, though – why? The obvious answer is that Netflix just wants to add value to its existing product but it’s debatable whether many people will make the extra step of downloading (rather generic) games in addition to the Netflix app just to fill ten minutes. The more involved answer is that Netflix wants to create a mobile presence of any description as a springboard for a later product release.

It’s a mystery worthy of Stranger Things but one that almost definitely has an answer larger than ‘just because’.

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Ibuki


Aspiring ninja.

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