For the past 10 years, Netflix has upended the media industry by taking a leap of faith. … Since 2011, Netflix has raised $15 billion in debt to help pay for this content. The company said it plans to pay back its outstanding debt that matures in 2021 with its more than $8 billion of cash on hand .Jan 19, 2021
Yikes they’ll be taking in a ton of debt and if gaming don’t work out it could be costly.
That is if they do something like Game Pass, and not on a smaller scale. We need to have more informations on what they will actually do, because gaming in itself costs a lot, on top of their movies/TV shows investments. I think they won’t do something big at first, seeing as they are not upping their subscriptions prices. Smaller and interactive games based on their content is more probable to me at first.
No, that’s not true. Apple TV has repeatedly tried and failed to get people to play mobile games on TV, and nobody wants to do that shit.
Oh? If that was true xbox would not bother with extending Gamepass to tvs and phones etc. Theres a huge difference bween these phone app games versus a pc, console type gamecwhich wbi makes. Also the public has gotten use to all these services, and netflix…i can see this happening but netflix doest have azure…
I wonder which company is currently on a buying spree for new studio spaces. Hmmm…
I was being facetious. 
But I don’t see why Valve would be an antitrust issue. PC is a separate marketplace, and if Steam is not a monopoly now as an independent (it’s not, there are loads of store fronts) then it won’t be if it changes ownership. Not with the Windows store tiny share of the market, anyway.
I guess if Windows store market share became competitive in itself by the time the acquisition came about it might be, but I doubt Steam + Windows store today is much more market share than Steam on its own.
Edit: and I guess if they did acquire they could just close down the games section of the Windows store so it was literally just an existing market place changing ownership. Shouldn’t be an issue.
I don’t know anything about Netflix starting up a gaming service other than what I have read here. However, I do know something about Netflix’s financials and its appetite for risk. Anyone claiming that Netflix “can’t” or “won’t” invest invest in gaming because it’s too expensive is probably incorrect.
Netflix spend about $15 billion in content creation in 2019, over $17 billion in 2020, and will probably spend about $20 billion in 2021. To put that in perspective, they are the single biggest spender in “Hollywood” (by a huge margin) and their spending probably dwarfs that of Xbox/Sony/Nintendo combined. if Netflix devoted just 5% of its spending ($1 billion) to gaming, it could fund 10 or more AAA games per year.
I’m not claiming that’s a good idea, or that it would be successful, I’m just saying that Netflix has never been shy about spending or taking big financial risks.
Yes, lots of that spending was financed with debt. That is part of their strategy and has been since day one. Frankly, the macroeconomic conditions are currently extremely favorable for borrowers, so as long as the debt can be serviced that is not a big issue. The exact same issues that many of you have pointed out make Microsoft not want to hold cash (rising inflation and tax rates) make it a great time for corporations to borrow - so if anything I could see Netflix borrowing even more aggressively in the next couple of years.
To summarize, I would not be that surprised if Netflix started to experiment with some gaming initiatives. They already have 200 million subscribers, but growth has been slowing and the TV/movie streaming market has become much more competitive recently. I’m sure they are looking for any way to help foster growth and make their subscription “stickier” for users.
I think now is a bit too early to know what they are gonna do right off the bat. I’m not convinced they will have a ton of AAA games right off the bat or they would have risen the price of their subscription. I think they will start slow and build from there progressively, like they have done with their TV Shows/movies.
Also if they plan to only put it on their service, they will either have to change their whole Cloud infrastructure, or rent from another one.
If Netflix start using their existing studios and production pipelines both PS and Xbox will face a big competition. Don’t forget Unreal Engine has some applications in film production and Netflix has produced some great looking CGI shows.
Right, I doubt they will fully commit without seeing what the customer response will be - and I have no idea what the back end strategy will be. I was just trying to provide some financial context.
Yeah, but it goes much further than that. Xbox and Playstation both have a set of tools specifically made for video games. At the end of the day, Netflix is still very much new in that. And again, Cloud for video games is really different from movies, so it is not going to be that huge thing on Day One.
They are obviously trying to compete with Gamepass since they have seen the business model getting so much success.
Is it confirmed that games will run on cloud? I don’t think so.
If they want their games to be available to all their customers, they won’t have a choice. Otherwise, their games will be present on other platforms too.
They have created one of the best open source tools for their existing AWS pipelines. These tools are so famous that sometimes you are asked about these in job interviews.
They are one of the pioneers of microservice architecture.
For a company that produces mostly crappy content they really have the best in class technical stack and talent.
They still don’t have the Cloud infrastructure for what they need to do. We don’t even know what they plan to do beyond they want games on their platform. It is really to soon to make a judgment and we need more informations. One thing I know is that Microsoft is not just going to stand idly by, if it is the big threat you think it is gonna be on Day One.
Microsoft knew about this threat long before when the haters weren’t not taking them seriously. Also regarding the cloud infrastructure, Netflix already gives a huge portion of its revenue to AWS to the point that it’s one of the biggest applications currently deployed on Amazon’s infrastructure and with far better user experience than what Amazon Prime offers.
I’m still not convinced it is gonna be huge on Day One, or they would have proposed a higher tier. I know they borrow a lot of money, but gaming costs a lot as well, and I think they will have a smaller catalogue on Day One that they will expand as time goes on.
Do they need their own cloud infrastructure? Sure, it would be cheaper, but it is not the only option. For instance… contrary to what people say, Stadia is yet not dead. And Google has said that they will explore offering Stadia as a B2B product (i.e. Netflix Games powered by Stadia).
The true transformative aspect of Cloud Gaming is that it is open to way more “platform holders” than just Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft. And, because of that, content will be the main competitive advantage. Netflix is constantly creating new IP, gaming is the next step on getting more profit out of it.
I agree, I’m just not convinced it is gonna be huge at launch, we don’t really know what they are going to do for now. Gaming is still a new venture for them after all. Microsoft will be even more careful for sure in the future.