Netflix has recently made another very subtle move towards its gaming business. After its “Unhinged” received good reviews from players, the CEO of Netflix even called it “one of the company’s most successful cloud gaming debuts.” However, not long after the praise was finished, the company announced this week that it would close two game development studios, Night School Studio and Moonloot. Netflix’s set of operations makes it feel like you have pressed the delete button on your own praise.
“Unhinged” was just promoted, but the studio disappeared first?
This is not the first time that Netflix has experienced the situation of “praise first, then cut”. The FIFA World Cup-themed game previously developed by Refactor Games was also hailed by Netflix as a very successful cloud gaming debut. However, just two months later, about 85% of Refactor Games’ employees were laid off. Now that Night School Studio and Moonloot have also been shut down, the operations of Netflix’s game department are starting to make people a little confused. Is the game successful, or is it so successful that it doesn’t even need a development team?
Netflix said it was a strategic adjustment, but its game ambitions have begun to shrink!
Netflix stated that the closure of the studio is to allow the game business to be more concentrated, and in the future it will focus its resources on children’s games, party games, drama works, and IP derivative games with mass market appeal. The company still emphasizes that games are an important direction to expand member entertainment content, but judging from previous layoffs, removal of games, and now direct closure of development studios, Netflix’s game strategy has obviously changed from initially casting a wide net to picking a few fish to raise.
They say the game is booming, but their hands keep shrinking.
What’s even more embarrassing is that Netflix only announced in July this year that its game interaction volume increased by 600% year-on-year, and it continued to emphasize its ambition to enter the game market. As a result, while releasing beautiful data, it continued to reduce the scale of internal development. This contrast naturally caused the outside world to question whether Netflix wanted to seriously make games. Players may still be wondering whether Netflix’s next game will be bigger, but Netflix shuts down the development studio first. This kind of “black humor” is indeed a bit too complete.