New stats on Netflix Games have become available, and they’re not looking great. Just a fraction, less than one percent, of the entire Netflix subscriber base actively play its games on a daily basis. This relatively low number of players is due to several reasons partially due to a lack of visibility and awareness.
Why Netflix Games is struggling with player count
Netflix’s catalog of games has been downloaded over 23 million times and has an average of 1.7 million daily users, according to Apptopia (via CNBC). On its own, that’s nothing to scoff at, but compared to Netflix’s total userbase of 221 million, that’s a paltry sum. Netflix plans to double the size of its total game offerings by the end of the year. One of them includes Queen’s Gambit Chess, based on the popular series about a female chess prodigy.
However, the streaming service likely needs to rework the design of its apps. Many who don’t use the Netflix app on mobile may not even be aware that the service even has games in the first place, like Exploding Kittens, Mahjong Solitaire, and Stranger Things: 1984. Moreover, the games are only available to subscribers and have to be downloaded separately. And then on the Netflix mobile app, you may need to scroll down a bit before seeing a game pop up.
Netflix’s strategy to ramp up its gaming division comes on the heels of the streaming service losing over a million subscribers across the first two quarters this year. This loss is significant enough for the company to consider various subscription tiers with and without ads and possibly cracking down on users who share their passwords. Facing competition with other companies attempting to take a share of the streaming pie, Netflix named Epic Games, YouTube, and TikTok as main competitors to its service in a letter to shareholders.
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