Just two years and one month ago, the streaming giant declared it was going to jump into a brand-new business: gaming. At a time when a free-to-play or ad-supported mobile gaming market prevails, Netflix was coming at games as if it were 2020 still, making games free with neither ads nor in-app purchase. The wager may just be starting to pay off. In 2023, Netflix Games downloads surged 183% compared to 2022 levels, reports Sensor Tower. So far in 2023, the games have had a total download of 81.2 million across App Store and Google Play. According to reports, downloads were recorded in the fourth quarter, representing approximately 53% of that total.
This is higher than the 36% of its 2022 game downloads attributed to fourth-quarter installs. Data shows that Netflix games saw downloads of 28.7 million times in 2022, and 5.2 million times back in 2021, Sensor Tower estimates.

An early effort that started out as a relatively modest catalog of casual games and titles tied to Netflix's hit shows, like "Stranger Things," the company quickly began to acquire game studios: Night School Studio, maker of "Oxenfree," in 2021, then cozy games developer Spry Fox, Finland's Next Games, publisher of a "Stranger Things" title, and Texas-based Boss Fight Entertainment, founded by former Zynga Dallas and Ensemble Studios employees.

The objective was to quickly build a portfolio of games that would appeal to the tastes and genre preferences of mobile gamers.

Through its acquisitions, Netflix also built studios around the world in addition to its internal studios, including a Helsinki studio led by a former Zynga GM and a Southern California studio led by Chacko Sonny, the former executive producer on Overwatch from Blizzard Entertainment.

It is doing pretty well on the mobile end as the company continues on its path to cloud gaming. The latest launch, Netflix's newest entrant, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which came out mid-last year, has been downloaded as the most for the streamer so far. In fact, it was the most downloaded in a month out of all the gaming catalogues, according to an app intelligence firm, Appfigures. In addition, GTA: Vice City is the sixth-most downloaded 2023 game on Netflix, and GTA III was its eleventh-most downloaded game of the year, Sensor Tower data indicates.
The GTA games were a huge hit, with all three combining to amass more than 6.4 million downloads in less than a week after landing on Netflix. Together, the three GTA games accounted for about 17% of Netflix's 2023 gaming downloads, a huge hit with mobile audiences — and perhaps a reason to keep a Netflix subscription open for free access. Downloads of Netflix's gaming portfolio tripled month over month in December, after doubling in November, according to Appfigures.

Because of the GTA titles, the No. 1 gaming genre on Netflix is "Action," but the company's gaming audience isn't strictly glued to one type of game. Its second-most popular genre is "Lifestyle" gaming, which thanks in part to "Too Hot to Handle" games accounted for half of Lifestyle category downloads, Sensor Tower data shows.

Puzzle" games took the third spot, as indicated by Sensor Tower, when the second most downloaded Netflix game, the fairy-tale puzzler Storyteller, which released on September 2023 also contributed to 10 percent of the game downloads of the global video streaming service over the course of the last year. The title launched for both PC and Nintendo Switch this year for $10. Given that the lowest-priced Netflix option is $6.99 per month, a gaming platform might appeal to people seeking to switch over throughout the year based on their library of games to cycle through.

Since GTA: San Andreas released at the end of December, Storyteller is also the number one game installed during December 2023, outpacing GTA: San Andreas by roughly half a million installs, according to Appfigures.

Many of the titles on the service are tied to Netflix's streaming titles - as with "Stranger Things," which had its own subset of games and showed up in Netflix's spin on the popular party game "Heads Up!." Other titles that are also part of games include "The Queen's Gambit," "Too Hot to Handle," "Money Heist," "Shadow & Bone," "Love Is Blind" and "Narcos." But there are many more that are just licensed or acquired titles.

For example, another one of the most downloaded games is "SpongeBob: Get Cooking," a casual time management game based on the popular cartoon. Appfigures' analysis indicates that GTA, Storyteller and Football Manager titles add millions of downloads too, thus proving that it's possible to achieve great gaming success without a tie-in from a Netflix show. The same company saw one of the top downloads until last fall in the tower defense title Bloons TD 6. However, the company warned that this recent spurt of downloads had occurred after "months of stagnation," implying that Netflix might have needed steady output and uninterrupted marketing efforts to keep its game engine purring.

Last year, it pushed for that goal by publishing 40 games, which also include the likes of "Monument Valley" and two games internally developed by itself: "Oxenfree II: Lost Signals" and "Netflix Stories: Love Is Blind." The service also began experimenting with gaming on TVs in the U.S., U.K., and Canada and offering tailored gaming recommendations within its app.

But daily game downloads following the GTA releases have been tappering off. GTA: San Andreas saw 1 million downloads on December 16, 2023, but that's fallen to less than 100,000 this Monday, for instance (see chart).
 
Now the company is building an AAA (big-budget) studio from scratch to work on a multi-platform game based on "unique IP," according to a LinkedIn posting from a Netflix recruiter late last year. As the post informs, game developers will cooperate with industry veterans Chacko Sonny, Gavin Irby, Joseph Staten, Rafael Grassetti and Jerry Edsall, who will lead the studio. The jobs posted today suggest open positions for gameplay designers and a senior mobile engineer, which may mean that the title is set for a cross-platform game.

The title would add Netflix's now 89 total games across platforms—though that figure is sure to grow in 2024, as well, as Netflix announced in December that it has nearly 90 more games in development.