Netflix’s interest in video games has been well-documented. The streaming giant has time and time shown interest in dipping its toes into interactive entertainment. Earlier, they started providing games in their highest subscription tier through the mobile app.
With their announcement of Night School Studios’ Oxenfree becoming available to play through the Netflix app, it seems the company is pretty serious about gaming. Earlier last night, the streaming giant announced that they are establishing an internal development studio in Helsinki, Finland.
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Marko Lastikka, who previously worked on Zynga Helsinki, will lead the team as the studio director. This is also the second game studio under Netflix in the country, the other studio in the country being Next Games.
Netflix game boss Amir Rahimi spoke a bit about this announcement. He said:
“This is another step in our vision to build a world-class games studio that will bring a variety of delightful and deeply engaging original games — with no ads and no in-app purchases — to our hundreds of millions of members around the world.”
“It’s still early days, and we have much more work to do to deliver a great games experience on Netflix. Creating a game can take years, so I’m proud to see how we’re steadily building the foundation of our games studios in our first year, and look forward to sharing what we produce in the coming years.”
The internal studio is the fourth studio under Netflix responsible for creating gaming experiences. The other three are Night School Studio, Boss Fight Entertainment and Next Games.
Earlier, Netflix announced their partnership with Ubisoft to publish three games exclusively next year. These developments prove that the company is pretty serious about creating video games.