Sep 27, 2022

Netflix to Establish Dedicated Gaming Studio in Helsinki

Netflix has announced plans to launch its own dedicated video game studio in Helsinki, Finland.

The new studio will be headed by Marco Rustikka, who has spent the past five years as vice president and general manager at Zynga games, most recently working on the viral franchise Farmville. Prior to that, he was executive producer and general manager at Electronic Arts (EA). [The announcement was made by Amir Rahimi, Netflix's Vice President of Game Studios: "[This is] another step in our vision to build a world-class game studio that delivers a variety of fun and deeply engaging original games, with no advertising or in-app purchases, to hundreds of millions of members worldwide. This is another step in our vision to build a world-class game studio that offers hundreds of millions of members around the world a variety of fun, deeply engaging original games without advertising or in-app purchases.

The custom-built studio will be the second Netflix game studio built from the ground up in Helsinki; Netflix has previously acquired three other game studios, including Next Games, also in Finish. The company's other game studio acquisitions are Night School Studio in Glendale, CA in September 2021 and Boss Fight Entertainment in Allen, TX this March.

"Each of these four studios has different strengths and areas of focus and will develop games that fit the diverse tastes of our members," Rahimi explained.

Netflix currently has a catalog of over 25 exclusive original games, which are included as part of the standard Netflix membership.

Since the gaming phase of this platform is still in its infancy, there is not much data available yet, making it difficult to put milestones into context. However, this past June, mobile analytics group Sensor Tower reported that the number of Netflix games downloaded exceeded 13 million. The most popular Netflix game at that point was "Stranger Things 1984," which was downloaded more than 2 million times; Netflix's flagship "Stranger Things" franchise is the company's third most popular mobile game, Stranger Things 3: The Game" (downloaded 1.5 million times), which also caused.

Sensor Tower's estimate does not include downloads of the original release of Stranger Things: Stranger Things: The Game, which was released by BonusXP because it was not a Netflix Games title. The number of downloads is not included. By the time the game was removed from the app store and moved to Netflix Games in 2021, it had been downloaded 13.8 million times.

Summing up his thoughts and looking to the future, Rahimi concluded his presentation by saying:

We are just getting started and there is still more work to be done to provide a great gaming experience on Netflix. It can take years to produce a game. So we are proud to be steadily building the foundation of our game studio in our first year and look forward to sharing what we produce in the coming years.