Netflix has announced that it is launching a brand new games studio that will work out of Helsinki, Finland. This will join the three companies under Next Games, Night School Studio and Boss Fight Entertainment to accelerate the development of titles for Netflix games. What makes this new in-house studio unique, however, is that it is starting from scratch with nothing, rather than coming under the Netflix umbrella as an acquisition.
Marko Lastikka will head the studio, having spent the last decade working for gaming giants Electronic Arts and Zynga. His experience in executive roles at these companies makes him the ideal candidate to lead Netflix’s new in-house games studio.
The fact that Netflix is still demonstrating its ambition to enter the gaming space, with yesterday’s announcement of a new game and today’s announcement of this news, shows that Netflix is taking gaming seriously. With finances getting tougher and consumer spending dropping, the company is scaling back its non-core activities, but with undiminished interest in gaming, it appears that gaming is now the streaming company’s next core focus.
Netflix is currently focused on mobile games, but over the past few years the company has been moving to a video streaming format for games, and since its core business is streaming video, perhaps we could see it expand into game streaming as well to take on the likes of Google Stadia, Amazon Luna and NVIDIA GeForce Now.
