By: Nick Gambino
After conquering and pretty much defining the movie and TV streaming era, Netflix has made moves in recent years to break into gaming. But now it’s been confirmed the streaming giant has shuttered their own AAA video game studio.
This news was first reported by Game File and has since been confirmed by Netflix. The studio that was known as “Blue” was tasked with creating an original IP, multiplatform game. From all accounts it was rolling right along.
There were no signs that Netflix wasn’t all in over the past couple years. They even stacked the Blue team with top-notch talent like Joseph Staten from the original Halo creative team and Chacko Sonn who shepherded Overwatch at Blizzard Entertainment.
Now, Blue is not Netflix’s only studio. They’ve got a number of them spread throughout the globe. And there’s no news about those studios packing up shop. Still, Blue was the company’s internal AAA game studio, reportedly the only one in their roster. This might be a sign of Netflix losing interest in conquering the gaming world or it at least means they may be looking to dial things back.
This whole endeavor began back in 2021 with the streamer releasing a few mobile games and promising a lot more to come. In that time, they’ve continued to pump out video games that could be played right through Netflix on a mobile device. There are over 100 in all in the Netflix Games catalog.
These include ports of popular titles like Grand Theft Auto and Hades but also games based on Netflix properties like Emily in Paris and Squid Game. From what we can gather, the recently nixed game being developed by Blue would have been one of the latter.
If they’re going to stop developing large-scale video games that will allow them to compete with the likes of ActivisionBlizzard and Nintendo, they will probably stick to mobile gaming as both host and developer. Once they’ve got enough of a foothold, they may then decide to give AAA game development another go.
