Now, following the acquisition of his company by Netflix in September 2021, the game maker works out of Netflix’s L.A. He used to share a building in northeast Los Angeles with the music producer Diplo’s record label, a block away from the Beastie Boys’ recording studio. Sean Krankel, founder of video game studio Night School, sits at the center of this effort. Since then, Netflix has followed the adage of so many smart, merciless companies: If you can’t beat them, join them, and if you need to, buy them.
“We compete with (and lose to) Fortnite more than HBO,” the company stated in its 2019 earnings report. In its 2021 fourth-quarter earnings report, Netflix admitted that the rise of streaming rivals was affecting its “marginal growth.” Thus, pushing into a new medium makes sense, especially because the company has publicly identified video games as its biggest competition in the cutthroat fight for attention.
The company has long had its eyes on interactive entertainment: A Stranger Things tie-in game arrived in 2017 the interactive drama Black Mirror: Bandersnatch was released a year later.
More than 15 years later, Netflix is gearing up for what appears to be its third and most ambitious act: video games. “Because DVD is not a hundred-year format, people wonder what will Netflix’s second act be.” “We’ve gotten used to it,” Netflix CEO Reed Hastings told The New York Times about the doomsday predictions, before adding that he understood why people were forecasting his company’s demise. Streaming, which was initially bundled with DVD subscriptions, arrived hot on the heels of widespread predictions about the death of Netflix, which had weathered challenges from giants such as Walmart, Apple, and Amazon. In 2007, just before DVD sales started to slump, Netflix unveiled its streaming technology.
0 kommentar(er)
