Netflix is accelerating its push into video games with plans to double its catalog of offerings by the end of the year, but for now, few of the streaming giant’s subscribers are playing.
Since last November, the company has been rolling out the games as a way to keep users engaged between show releases. The games are accessible only to subscribers, but have to be downloaded as separate apps.
The games have been downloaded a total of 23.3 million times and average 1.7 million daily users, according to Apptopia, an app analytics company. That’s less than 1% of Netflix’s 221 million subscribers.
The importance of games to Netflix’s overall strategy has arguably increased in recent months as the company faces intensifying competition for user attention. In the second quarter, Netflix lost nearly a million subscribers, after losing 200,000 subscribers during the first quarter — its first subscriber declines in more than a decade.
In a letter to shareholders last year, Netflix named Epic Games and TikTok as among its biggest rivals for people’s time.
“One of the many advantages to Netflix in pursuing the strategy is the ability to drive engagement beyond when the show first comes out on the platform,” Prosek Partners analyst Tom Forte said.
Still, Netflix Chief Operating Officer Greg Peters said last year the company was “many months and really, frankly, years” into learning how games can keep customers on the service.
“We’re going to be experimental and try a bunch of things,” Peters said during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings conference call. “But I would say the eyes that we have on the long-term prize really center more around our ability to create properties that are connected to the universes, the characters, the stories that we’re building.”
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