Netflix has big plans for gaming. The video games for smartphones included in the subscription are just the tip of the iceberg, the streaming giant has confirmed that it has entered the market of gaming in the cloud.
A decidedly ambitious challenge, especially when you consider that it is a market that, although very young, has already claimed more than a few victims. Google, with its Stadia service, has already given up.
“We are considering this possibility very seriously,” he explained Mike Verdu, N.2 from Netflix’s gaming division, at a conference hosted by Tech Crunch. “We intend to take the same approach as with furniture: we will start with modesty, small, and we will evaluate our movements step by step”.
“However, I believe that it is an initiative that we should undertake,” he added. Important in the gaming Netflix has been talking about it for several months now. The company has already published several job openings and has expressed an interest in hiring some highly specialized figures. Netflix sees video games as a fundamental asset for the growth of its company, which otherwise, by focusing only on streaming entertainment, soon risks bumping into insurmountable walls.
During the last quarter, Netflix confirmed that it still wants to invest in Netflix games, the offer of mobile video games included for free in the subscription. While the service has proven to be a semi-flop so far (it seems less than 1% of users are using it), Netflix has announced that it’s working on developing more than 50 new video games.
But one thing is smartphone video games, another thing is cloud gaming: that is, the ability to play high-budget video games without any special hardware, such as a console or a high-end PC. One day we were able to open the Netflix application, sitting comfortably on the couch, on our home TV. With a simple push of a button, it is possible to switch from the catalog of movies and TV series to a screen entirely dedicated to video games, showing the latest news of the moment without the need for a console. This is what Netflix is aiming for. Microsoft, NVIDIA and Amazon should perhaps start to worry.
Source: Lega Nerd
