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When Netflix games chief Alain Tascan sat in front of a room full of reporters at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco on March 19, he spoke more openly about the streamer’s gaming strategy than any exec ever has since the Big Red N signaled it was getting into the biz in 2021.
Tascan’s boldest statement during the two-hour presentation: “We have to match the overall mission of Netflix — otherwise we’re just a distraction.”
The exec, who joined Netflix in July 2024 with 30 years of industry experience at “Fortnite” maker Epic Games, EA and Ubisoft, was acknowledging the elephant in the room. The question looming over Netflix’s foray into games has been whether the company sees it as a category that, over the long run, will be on par with TV and film in driving revenue and reducing churn.
Netflix’s top execs have insisted that’s the aim. “We’re iteratively showing our members that we are a place to discover and play games, and we look forward to continuing to launch bigger and bigger games every year,” co-CEO Greg Peters said in the company’s earnings call in January.
The company has hit some speed bumps in figuring out how to scale up its games business. In October 2024, Netflix shut down its Team Blue studio, which had been developing a shooter title (something akin to, say, “Call of Duty”). The move signaled to the industry a strategy shift, which was further underlined by the exit of Netflix gaming lead Mike Verdu last month.
But Tascan told Variety during an interview at GDC the closure of Team Blue doesn’t mean Netflix isn’t willing to take big swings. That just wasn’t the right one. Team Blue was developing a “triple A-style” shooter game — a very crowded space — “and I felt that if we want to do a big production and be innovative, that’s not the place where we should be,” he said.
“It doesn’t mean we have less ambition to do something big,” Tascan added. “I want to make that super clear, because some people read that we’re reducing – that’s not at all the case. It was an amazing team, exceptional talent that were doing something very, very precise which I believe belonged to the console world or the PC world, not adapted to the platform we work in.” Tascan says the Team Blue project “probably would have been something really good,” but Netflix needs to “be innovative and do things differently if we want to be successful.”
Spry Fox/Netflix
Spry Fox/Netflix
For Tascan, that means focusing on new and existing IP in multiple areas as Netflix rolls out games that can be played on the TV, as well as expanding its mobile lineup with narrative games, party games (“couchplay,” as Netflix puts it), kids games and mainstream titles. Among the titles Netflix showed off at GDC was “Spirit Crossing,” a Studio Ghibli-esque fantastical life-sim game set as a massive multiplayer online offering. It’s original IP and an ambitious title from Netflix’s Spry Fox studio (acquired in 2022). The hands-on demos of the game are still buggy, but no release date has been announced, so Netflix has time to get it right.
At GDC, Tascan outlined a vision for how games can become more integral to the Netflix business model. One strategy is to incentivize players of games based on Netflix IP, like the streamer’s hit “Squid Game” mobile game, to binge the corresponding show or movie to in turn unlock prizes in the game. Tascan wants to make games part of a truly transmedia experience, an area where Netflix can do some “crazy interesting things.”
“Ultimately, imagine a world where you watch something and then you’re entering the world [in the game] and let’s say you break something or you kill a character and then you go back to watch the following [episode] and all the things that you’ve broken… it’s broken the way you broke it or the character you killed, or you’ve changed his mind, has begun behaving differently,” Tascan told Variety.
That said, Netflix still has a lot of work to get to that stage. Tascan says they “just crashed the servers with something easy,” and the early steps here are perfecting the tech that connects subscribers’ viewing habits to their gameplay activity.
Meanwhile, Tascan and his team also are exploring innovative ways to blend linear and interactive storytelling across valuable Netflix franchises like Shonda Rhimes’ “Bridgerton.” “In games you want to be in a world and tell your own story. ‘Bridgerton’ is a perfect example,” Tascan said. Other TV shows he sees as having the potential for this type of gameplay are “Stranger Things” and “One Piece.”
“If I was in the world of ‘Harry Potter,’ I don’t want to be Harry Potter. I’m myself and I’m going to choose a different house and I’m going to do different spells and I want to tell my own story,” the exec said. “So we have to find worlds that are very attractive for people to be in and to tell their own stories. ‘Bridgerton’ is one. I think ‘Stranger Things’ has a lot of potential there. I believe ‘One Piece’ is another one that I would love to explore.”
But launching a show (or movie) and a game tied to it at the same time is tricky to align in development. Tascan is mum, for example, on whether the launch of a “Stranger Things” game could be timed to the final season’s release later this year, or when there might be a “Bridgerton” game adaptation.
“Different timelines, different things, the writing. That’s why we have to still find and work together with people interested in doing this, not everybody is,” Tascan said. “And find the right [show or movie] concept and gaming concept that live harmoniously together.”
“For ‘Bridgerton,’ it would be something really special that fits the theme,” he adds. “I’m not going to do a shooter with ‘Bridgerton.’ So what’s really the fantasy you would have if you were in the world of ‘Bridgerton’ and how can we deliver against it?”
