For the previous few years, subscription gaming companies like Apple Arcade and Netflix have provided cell recreation builders one thing of a haven for high-quality, premium cell video games: a kind of recreation that had turn out to be vanishingly uncommon following the rise of the microtransaction-stuffed free-to-play mannequin. However as these companies’ as soon as enviable lineup of indie video games dwindles, that haven seems to be shrinking.
In 2021, Netflix announced a new gaming initiative, providing customers an opportunity to play video games by the streaming service’s cell app. Apple launched an analogous program with Apple Arcade simply two years earlier than that. Each companies provided an fascinating worth proposition: Pay a month-to-month subscription price to get entry to a library of premium video games, with a few of these video games out there as cell exclusives. These video games would don’t have any advertisements or in-app purchases, and the cash paid to studios would ostensibly be used to fund the event of extra video games.
The video games themselves lined an fascinating vary of genres and subjects, from strategy games featuring depression and dodgeball to discovering one’s place by literally rearranging the space around you. Netflix funding one thing like Harmonium: The Musical, a recreation a few Deaf lady’s love of music, signaled that the platform was taking its gaming initiative severely, bringing titles from off the overwhelmed path to the platform. However now that recreation appears to have been pulled from Netflix’s lineup.
Along with serving as a writer, Netflix took the extra step of outright buying recreation studios like Oxenfree developer Night time College Studio and Cozy Grove studio Spry Fox to make bespoke video games for the service. However late final 12 months, Netflix closed down the studio it spun as much as produce what was going to be the service’s first blockbuster AAA recreation. Then, simply this month, it introduced it was going to delist some of its most notable third-party titles, together with indie darlings like Hades and the Monument Valley collection.
Netflix is more and more targeted on video games tied to its personal content material. In its most up-to-date quarterly earnings report, the platform briefly extolled its continued investment in titles like Squid Game: Unleashed and Thronglets — video games tied to Netflix-produced Squid Recreation and Black Mirror, respectively.
This focus, although, appears to return on the expense of including present unique video games from unbiased builders. It’s straightforward to grasp this shift. Whereas these companies don’t share a lot about arduous numbers, third-party reporting advised that almost all of Netflix customers never engaged with the platform’s gaming offerings. And the video games they have been enjoying, in nevertheless restricted quantities, have been acquainted titles. It’s no shock that GTA had Netflix’s biggest game launch.
At GDC 2025, Netflix’s president of video games, Alain Tascan, spoke to The Verge about the platform refocusing its gaming efforts, saying of indie video games, “We are going to proceed supporting a few of them, however I really feel that indie avid gamers usually are not actually coming to Netflix to search out indie video games.”
To this point Apple has solely purchased a single game studio to make content material for Apple Arcade, although its retreat to extra informal choices follows an analogous sample as Netflix. Unique or indie video games seem much less continuously in favor of these hooked up to large, family-friendly IP like Uno, Indignant Birds, and Bluey, all three of which are featured in Apple Arcade’s July update. Payouts from Apple Arcade have reportedly been shrinking whereas builders have complained that it’s arduous to get their video games seen on the platform.
The free-to-play mannequin has conditioned customers that spending cash for gaming content material could be optionally available. Informal video games like Monopoly Go earn cash by in-game ads or opt-in client spending on microtransactions, and few conventional paid video games exterior of Minecraft at the moment are in a position to break by that mindset.
Subscription services were viewed as a kind of equalizer. With funding from Apple and Netflix and elsewhere, high quality video games could possibly be dropped at a platform not typically related to high quality gaming experiences. Builders might fund their imaginative and prescient and never have to fret about monetization, whereas shoppers might entry these video games with a month-to-month subscription and no added prices.
However a couple of years in, the goal of those companies has been adjusted, and informal video games designed to maintain eyeballs on an app for so long as attainable, or promote the newest streaming collection, have received out. Regardless of sturdy lineups of indie video games, neither Netflix nor Apple might actually minimize by the noise, and their choices are now not distinctive. Worse nonetheless, the distinctive video games they did have now have fewer locations to go.