After last fall indicating its intentions to expand into cloud gaming, Netflix today is launching a new app that will soon allow subscribers to play games on their television. The app, branded "Netflix Game Controller," lets you use your phone as a controller after pairing it with your TV to play the games available through Netflix's service.

Although the game has been spotted on the App Store, so far, it's mum on which Netflix games might be coming to the screen and when. The description of the app simply goes: "Coming soon to Netflix."

The company has refused to make further statements about its plan or even timeline.

Yet, it has already declared its ambitions to go beyond mobile gaming.

In October 2022, Netflix VP of gaming Mike Verdu revealed to our audience at the TechCrunch Disrupt event that Netflix was "exploring a cloud gaming offering." He also revealed the company would open a new gaming studio in Southern California, led by Chacko Sonny, the former executive producer on Overwatch at Blizzard Entertainment.

The exec clarified he didn't see Netflix competing in the same space as PlayStation or Xbox, however.

"It's a value add. We're not asking you to subscribe as a console replacement," Verdu said at the time. "It's a completely different business model. The hope is over time that it just becomes this very natural way to play games wherever you are."

Other cloud gaming services have also flopped, like Google's Stadia. The Netflix people believe the issues are not in the technology but in the business model. Verdu said the games on Stadia were really fun to play but not sustainable as a business.
Netflix packages free games into the price of its streaming subscription.

As Netflix continued to add more games to its service, Netflix's VP of external games Leanne Loombe this May touted Netflix's cloud gaming ambitions saying, "We do believe that cloud gaming will enable us to provide that easy access to games on any screen. Our overall vision is that our members can play games on any Netflix device they have" - a statement that would clearly include users' TVs.

By midmonth, the streamer elaborated that it had something like 40 games due for release this year; in addition to 16 that were being developed under its in-house studios together with 70 more still under development in collaboration with its other partners. 
Since it launched gaming at the end of November of last year, Netflix had published its catalog north of 50 titles.

Reports from March revealed that this time, Netflix is taking things to the next level by even developing an iPhone-based game controller.

Netflix is said to be planning to bring games to the TV with the iPhone as the controller.

The flip side of that is where expectations for Netflix Gaming would instead go. That interest into the service had waned in recent months, while the Street was far more obsessed with the pending account-sharing policy, which may well have helped Netflix more in terms of operating-performance effects. For its final quarter, Netflix added a total of 5.9 million international subscribers in order to boost its core base to 238.4 million- a suggestion the strategy was finally now proving fruitful. At the very same time, this means also there will be more prospective gamers, theoretically speaking as well, who Netflix cloud game can then feed in once it rolls out as well.

For now, this new Netflix Gaming Controller is available only for iOS. As it's still that new to arrive, the data.ai market intelligence firm cannot see it listed under apps and games on its service neither have information on rankings.