It is becoming more and more evident that Netflix has taken itself very seriously to become the Netflix of video games. Either because the concept was constantly repeated for years, something that we can be sure was observed with considerable interest by the company, or because competition in the world of streaming is increasingly fierce and the dean of the sector must find a clear way to differentiate, the fact is that since they announced their arrival in this market, we see slow but constant progress.
Its purpose of adding 40 new games this 2023 is quite ambitious, and the same can be said of its plans to create its own triple A, a title that we only know about, for now, that it aspires to deserve said categorization, and that as indicated In some of the job offers published to create the team that will be responsible for its development, it points out that it will not have micropayments, advertising insertions or other means of monetization. We hope, of course, that the game will be included in the Netflix subscription, as have all the games published so far.
These goals are ambitious, he said, but they pale in comparison to something we already told you about a few months ago: their interest in cloud gaming. And no, it’s not that Netflix has considered taking on services like GeForce Now and Xbox Cloud. Not the plan happens, as we told you when informing you about the count of games that it aspires to publish this year, for getting its games to any device on which it is possible to play content from the platform. If it is used to watch a movie or a series, it must be used to play.
This, of course, poses a number of challenges. Of course, the size of the infrastructure necessary to support such a service is more than considerable, and its management will not be easy, and the management of licenses will also have its complications, something in which at least the company is already versed, since It is a problem that also occurs with series and movies.
But there are also other simpler problems, but that require a solution, and a very clear example of this can be found in the control of games. This is not a problem if we access them from the smartphone or PC, but what happens if we do it from an Android TV or a television, for example? Well, the good news is that Netflix seems to have found a solution and, if it works, it seems like a very good idea to me.
As we can read in Bloomberg (behind the paywall), Netflix is testing the use of smartphones as controllers for games. This is not the first time we have seen such technology, Google has already done something similar with Stadia and Phone Link, so it is technologically a feasible option, although we will still have to see if it is possible to make it work with all types of devices, and in At this point I am thinking especially of televisions.
