By Gavin Boyle
Netflix looks to make its gaming library more valuable than ever by introducing party games hosted on a user’s TV, while players use their phone as a controller.
“What’s exciting is that now we are moving beyond the phone to the TVs. So I mentioned once that the gaming areas we’re going after, one of the big gaming areas we’re going after now is, you know, social gaming experiences that will show up on your TV,” Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters told Bloomberg. “So we are announcing right now it’s here actually that we’re going to have these social party games, a pack of social party games that you can play on your TV with your phones as the controller. And it’s things like, you know, recognizable games like Boggle, you got Pictionary, we’ve got a Lego Party game, we’ve got Tetris, we’ve got a Mafia style whodunit.”
“There’s all sorts of things you’re going to be able to do on your phone that you can’t do on a normal controller, like touch screen… And, you know, it’s dead simple to use. It’s intuitive. And then, you know, it’s the earliest days of how we actually can use that,” Peters continued.
Related: How Netflix Shifted Its Games Library Strategy
The jump to games on TVs comes as Netflix has narrowed its approach to video games within the past year, committing to creating games that fall into at least one of four categories: narrative games, party games, kids games or mainstream games based on their popular IP. The five games announced for the TV fall into the party game category as they will be played by a group of people competing against each other in-person.
“We started with those [categories]. Down the road, we might add more if it makes sense, but I think starting from these four is already a lot,” the head of Netflix Games, Alain Tascan, told The Verge in March.
While many Netflix subscribers still don’t know that the service even offers games, Netflix has always planned for its users’ uptake to be slow, rather than a massive interest all at once. The company views it similar to expanding into a new market – which can often take years before it starts to pay off.
“You can think about Japan or India,” Peters said when explaining how the company is treating gaming similar to an international market. “We continually iterate. We refine our programming based on the signals we get from our members.”
Netflix did not provide a date for when these games would be released, but it is expected they will debut soon so families can enjoy them together for the holiday season.
Read Next: Netflix to Expand Gaming Service Through Hit Shows
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