For the previous couple of years, subscription gaming providers like Apple Arcade and Netflix have provided cell recreation builders one thing of a haven for high-quality, premium cell video games: a sort of recreation that had grow to be vanishingly uncommon following the rise of the microtransaction-stuffed free-to-play mannequin. However as these providers’ as soon as enviable lineup of indie video games dwindles, that haven seems to be shrinking.
In 2021, Netflix announced a new gaming initiative, providing customers an opportunity to play video games by the streaming service’s cell app. Apple launched the same program with Apple Arcade simply two years earlier than that. Each providers provided an attention-grabbing worth proposition: Pay a month-to-month subscription charge to get entry to a library of premium video games, with a few of these video games obtainable as cell exclusives. These video games would don’t have any adverts or in-app purchases, and the cash paid to studios would ostensibly be used to fund the event of extra video games.
The video games themselves coated an attention-grabbing vary of genres and matters, from strategy games featuring depression and dodgeball to discovering one’s place by literally rearranging the space around you. Netflix funding one thing like Harmonium: The Musical, a recreation a few Deaf lady’s love of music, signaled that the platform was taking its gaming initiative severely, bringing titles from off the crushed path to the platform. However now that recreation appears to have been pulled from Netflix’s lineup.
Along with serving as a writer, Netflix took the extra step of outright buying recreation studios like Oxenfree developer Evening Faculty Studio and Cozy Grove studio Spry Fox to make bespoke video games for the service. However late final yr, Netflix closed down the studio it spun as much as produce what was going to be the service’s first blockbuster AAA recreation. Then, simply this month, it introduced it was going to delist some of its most notable third-party titles, together with indie darlings like Hades and the Monument Valley sequence.
Netflix is more and more targeted on video games tied to its personal content material. In its most up-to-date quarterly earnings report, the platform briefly extolled its continued investment in titles like Squid Game: Unleashed and Thronglets — video games tied to Netflix-produced Squid Sport and Black Mirror, respectively.
This focus, although, appears to return on the expense of including current authentic video games from unbiased builders. It’s simple to know this shift. Whereas these providers don’t share a lot about arduous numbers, third-party reporting instructed that almost all of Netflix customers never engaged with the platform’s gaming offerings. And the video games they have been enjoying, in nonetheless restricted quantities, have been acquainted titles. It’s no shock that GTA had Netflix’s biggest game launch.
At GDC 2025, Netflix’s president of video games, Alain Tascan, spoke to The Verge about the platform refocusing its gaming efforts, saying of indie video games, “We’ll proceed supporting a few of them, however I really feel that indie players are usually not actually coming to Netflix to search out indie video games.”
Thus far Apple has solely purchased a single game studio to make content material for Apple Arcade, although its retreat to extra informal choices follows the same sample as Netflix. Authentic or indie video games seem much less steadily in favor of these connected to large, family-friendly IP like Uno, Offended Birds, and Bluey, all three of which are featured in Apple Arcade’s July update. Payouts from Apple Arcade have reportedly been shrinking whereas builders have complained that it’s arduous to get their video games observed on the platform.
The free-to-play mannequin has conditioned customers that spending cash for gaming content material will be elective. Informal video games like Monopoly Go earn a living by in-game commercials or opt-in shopper spending on microtransactions, and few conventional paid video games exterior of Minecraft are actually in a position to break by that mindset.
Subscription services were viewed as a kind of equalizer. With funding from Apple and Netflix and elsewhere, high quality video games could possibly be delivered to a platform not usually related to high quality gaming experiences. Builders may fund their imaginative and prescient and never have to fret about monetization, whereas shoppers may entry these video games with a month-to-month subscription and no added prices.
However just a few years in, the purpose of those providers has been adjusted, and informal video games designed to maintain eyeballs on an app for so long as potential, or promote the most recent streaming sequence, have gained out. Regardless of robust lineups of indie video games, neither Netflix nor Apple may actually reduce by the noise, and their choices are not distinctive. Worse nonetheless, the distinctive video games they did have now have fewer locations to go.