Netflixpossibly in an attempt to take advantage of the gap left by Stadia and after announcing its latest good financial results, has confirmed its interest in entering the services of cloud gaming so that users can play from any device.
During the TechCrunch Discrupt event, the vice president of video games at Netflix, Mike Verdu, has said that he is “seriously exploring a cloud gaming offering. We’ll approach this the same way we did with mobile: start small, be humble, be thoughtful, but it’s a step we think we need to take. Cloud extension is really about reaching other devices where people experience Netflix”.
Although he does not seem to have been very explicit when explaining it, Verdu has suggested that the company should move beyond casual TV-oriented games. This hints at the possibility of adding triple A games to its catalog, but here we are already speculating too much. Secondly, also did not confirm if Netflix would develop its own controllers for video games, although he did say that these would not use the TV remotes for input. Today there are plenty of specifications and standards to be able to connect an Xbox controller, PlayStation and even the Switch Pro Controller to any device, and seeing how consolidated the first ones are on the PC, there may not be any compelling reasons to develop own controller.
Netflix’s interest in video games in the cloud comes from afar, but until now all its movements have been somewhat timid and mainly with titles made or commissioned by it and that do not particularly stand out. We will see if the content company via streaming decides to follow the same path or turn to a greater variety of content in order to reach a greater variety of player profiles, especially when it comes to going beyond the casual audience.
Netflix has had a lot of competition in recent years, but the worst thing is that it comes from corporations that are much larger and that have VOD as a complement and not as the main source of income. The intentions of hacking shared accounts and betting more on video games hint at a possible major change in Netflix’s business model, which we’ll see how it turns out in the end.
If Netflix decides to bet on video games in the cloud, there they will have to do mainly with Xbox Game Pass and GeForce Now, two services coming respectively from two highly respected companies in the world of video games, Microsoft and NVIDIA, while for there is also Amazon Luna, belonging to the giant founded by Jeff Bezos.
