The free games being offered to Amazon Prime subscribers in September 2023 have been confirmed — the line-up is set to kick off withFootball Manager 2023 next week.
15.08.2023 - 17:25 / polygon.com / Mike Verdu
Netflix has announced a move that many have been waiting for the company to make ever since it started to get into gaming: game streaming direct to TVs.
In a low-key announcement, Netflix’s gaming boss Mike Verdu said it has begun “a limited beta test to a small number of members in Canada and the U.K.,” allowing them to play two games on their TVs. Support for playing on PCs via browsers will follow in the next few weeks, Verdu said.
Rather than support bluetooth controllers, at present the Netflix cloud gaming service will use a bespoke smartphone controller app (which had already been spotted on the iOS App Store late last week). The app appears to put a simple, virtual stick-and-button layout on the phone screen, with a big, fat A button surrounded by small B, X, and Y buttons — an arrangement familiar from Nintendo’s much-loved but seldom imitated GameCube controller. On PCs, mouse-and-keyboard control will be supported.
The games playable in the beta test are Oxenfree, the cult narrative adventure game from Night School Studio, which was acquired by Netflix in 2021, and something called Molehew’s Mining Adventure. The latter game is a total mystery — unlike Oxenfree, it’s not part of the existing catalog of games that can be played natively on smartphones as part of a Netflix subscription. According to Verdu, it’s a “gem-mining arcade game.”
“Our goal has always been to have a game for everyone, and we are working hard to meet members where they are with an accessible, smooth, and ubiquitous service. Today, we’re taking the first step in making games playable on every device where our members enjoy Netflix — TVs, computers, and mobile,” Verdu said.
“This limited beta is meant to test our game streaming technology and controller, and to improve the member experience over time,” he added, taking pains to point out that “we’re still very early in our games journey.”
The tentative nature of the announcement contrasts with Google’s noisy but ill-fated push into cloud gaming, Stadia, which launched in late 2019 and closed just three years later. While many expect cloud gaming to a key part of the future of video games, there are many technological and other barriers to its growth, and uptake for rival services like Xbox Cloud Gaming (which is technically still in beta) and Nvidia’s GeForce Now has been slow. In that context, Netflix’s caution in entering the competition to establish what is often called the “Netflix for games” makes sense.
Another challenge for Netflix is that its gaming catalog, while actually pretty high-quality, has been built around mobile gaming so far, and many of those experiences won’t translate well to TV screens. It seems a safe bet to expect its streaming service to focus
The free games being offered to Amazon Prime subscribers in September 2023 have been confirmed — the line-up is set to kick off withFootball Manager 2023 next week.
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By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.
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Good news for Gamers! Netflix is expanding its gaming experience to the big screen. The company has recently announced that it has started limited beta testing, in select regions, of a new feature that will allow all users to play games through Netflix no matter which device they use. This means you will be able to play games on TV, PC, and Mac. So far, users could only play Netflix games on their Android and iOS devices, and only after they installed the game from the app marketplace. However, this new feature will directly cloud stream the games from Netflix servers to the device of the user.
I keep forgetting that Netflix have their own games offering, despite the streaming giant keeping it well stocked with a fairly solid library of free (if you’re a Netflix subscriber anyway) games - including the likes of Oxenfree 2, Kentucky Route Zero and Immortality. If you wanted some more proof that Netflix is pretty serious about this whole “getting into video games” thing, the movie streaming platform-turned-games publisher is now looking to unite their two fronts by experimenting with game streaming.
It’s been confirmed that Amazon Prime Gaming is hosting a number of giveaways in celebration of the Valorant Champions 2023 tournament, which kicked off earlier this month.
Netflix has quietly been building up its gaming offering since 2021, when the streaming service first started promoting mobile games to users on iOS and Android.