Picture: moth.studio
Earlier this week, we first reported on the news that Netflix Games would undergo a significant shake-up, with the departure of 23 games from the library, representing approximately 20% of Netflix’s overall offering. The media at large have now widely reported this news, and some game developers and publishers appear just as shocked as players. Here are the reactions and official comments from developers so far.
Since our original report, we’ve also updated it to include the fact that Fashionverse is amongst the planned departures, which is also leaving on July 15th. Hades and Carmen Sandiego have been confirmed to have slightly earlier removals than those planned for July 1st.
As a reminder, the 23 games leaving:
- Battleship
- Braid, Anniversary Edition
- Carmen Sandiego (Leaving July 1st)
- CoComelon: Play with JJ
- Death’s Door
- Diner Out: Merge Cafe
- Dumb Ways to Die
- Fashionverse
- Ghost Detective
- Hades (Note: Only available on iOS devices – Leaving July 1st)
- Katana ZERO
- LEGO Legacy: Heroes Unboxed
- Ludo King
- Monument Valley
- Monument Valley 2
- Monument Valley 3
- Rainbow Six: SMOL
- Raji: An Ancient Epic
- SpongeBob: Bubble Pop F.U.N.
- TED Tumblewords
- The Case of the Golden Idol
- The Rise of the Golden Idol
- Vineyard Valley
But what have the developers been saying? Let’s dive in.
Monument Valley is among the biggest of the shock departures. Netflix acquired all three games, with the latter being a timed exclusive. Netflix provided the game with a significant marketing boost by featuring it during its Geeked Week 2024 showcase. The good news is that a wider rollout of the third game is now planned for July 22nd.
Speaking in the Discord for ustwo games, the developers of Monument Valley, Conor Clarke, said:
“Monument Valley 3 will be leaving Netflix Games, with everyone’s last day to play there being July 14th.
If anyone has been playing on mobile through Netflix, the game will no longer be accessible after that date, something that is sadly out of our control.
However, we hope this means we can focus on bringing Monument Valley 3 to more players than ever before, no matter how or where you play, starting with the game’s release for console and PC on July 22nd.
We will be sharing more information about the future of Monument Valley 3 on mobile soon, but unfortunately I have nothing to share on that front just yet.”
GameLoft, the team behind Carmen Sandiego, which only released on Netflix games six months ago, has yet to release an official statement. That said, in Discord, their community manager, Cass, said:
“We’ve seen the news and know many of you are surprised and saddened we are too. While we don’t have all the details yet, what we can confirm is that Carmen Sandiego will continue to be available on PC and consoles, with more updates on the way. Thanks for sticking with us, we’ll share more as soon as we’re able.”
Devolver Digital, which has had multiple games now pulled from Netflix, including Poinpy in June, and now three more, spoke to The Verge and said:
“We are looking at bringing games that leave services like Poinpy, Katana Zero, and Death’s Door to mobile stores as premium titles.”
Two of the Golden Idol games are among the departures, and many fans had been hoping some of the newer DLCs would come to Netflix. Andrejs Klavins, one of the founders of Color Gray Games, responded to the departures on Discord, saying:
“This is all recent news for us, and all the practical implications are yet to be worked out. Once we have more information, we will update you.”
We have reached out to more publishers and developers from the games list and will update you should they issue statements.
Players React to Games Removals on Netflix
Players have been reacting to the announcement of various games departing, too. There are some obvious frustrations regarding where the game’s head is next, and that sounds like it’s going to be on a case-by-case basis.
There are also specific questions regarding progress and game saves if and when these games do become available outside of Netflix’s ecosystem. Those questions are yet to be answered, but Netflix Game saves are notoriously hard to transfer (see help documentation here), given that you’re currently unable to transfer saves between profiles and to different devices (unless the game supports cloud saves).
One community support agent on the Supergiant Games Discord (they’re the team behind Hades) replied to one concerned about losing his game file, saying: “Unfortunately, to my knowledge, there is not a way to transfer save progress from the mobile version. If you get the game on Steam or Epic, we have some premade save files to help kickstart people who lose their progress. (And, if you get it on Steam, you can use it just long enough to transfer that file to the Switch before refunding on Steam)”
Of course, many of the threads had a common question: “Netflix has games?”
Given that the removals are lining up together, rather than licensing coming to an end naturally, we’re speculating that the licenses are being terminated early. Given many of the developers’ surprised comments above, this seems to stack up. We’ve seen before that when Netflix cleans house for games, it often does so in one swift move. The question then becomes, why terminate these game licensing deals? None of these featured in the daily top 10s for games for the past 30 days, and looking back at our report on the most popular games, many of these were middling performers at best, so it comes down to a broader change at Netflix Games and a pivot in strategy. As we noted in our original report, we’ve been hearing that most of the focus now at Netflix is on the TV experience, where games play a big role with their own dedicated tab in the new Netflix UI rollout.
