My household is tricky to please. A 12-year-old who essentially wants to play Fortnite 24/7, a four-year-old who wants to do what the 12-year-old is doing but can’t because she’s four, and me and my wife who want to do anything that’ll keep those two happy for more than five minutes so we can sit on the sofa and drink a coffee because we deserve FIVE GODDAMN MINUTES! It doesn’t sound like much of an ask, but it really is, trust me. I needed a Christmas Golden Goose, something I could tap into whenever family harmony started to teeter towards a level of chaos no amount of Cadbury’s Heroes could remedy – while the Bluey scavenger hunt game is good, it definitely skews more four-year-old, and traditional video games were off the menu. In my festive hour of need, as if sent by Santa himself, Netflix provided. Yes, Netflix. And no, we didn’t just watch The Grinch on repeat (although we did watch it a lot – the animated one, not the naff Jim Carrey one).
I think it’s fair to say that Netflix has approached video games like a lot of companies trying to break into that industry do: there’s money to be made so they throw money at it and hope something good happens. Amazon, Apple, and Google are three giants who have tried or are trying with very mixed results, seemingly oblivious to why the biggest names in gaming became the biggest names. Netflix, while dabbling with console and PC games, has focused mainly on mobile, accessed directly from its app as part of your subscripti on – and this has borne some tidy exclusives (both developed and acquired). While I have enjoyed the likes of Poinpy and Red Dead Redemption on my phone, it is only thanks to the relatively new Game Night offerings that I’ve seen the potential of Netflix games on the family TV.
Having just finished watching Santa Clause: The Movie for the third time in two days (the odd Dudley Moore film I remembered from my childhood and suggested my kids watch, only to discover it opens with a Middle Ages pre-Santa Mr. Clause freezing to death in a snowstorm alongside his wife and reindeer having got stuck while attempting to deliver homemade presents to children in a remote village – it’s fine as he is brought back to life by elves – but then does end up having to compete with an impossibly old-looking evil 40-year-old toy-manufacturing John Lithgow to win back the affections of disillusioned 80s children after Lithgow opportunistically used elven magic to create a lollipop that makes people fly after the head elf sought new employment after initiating a disastrous manufacturing switch in the North Pole, changing from elf-made to machine-made toys that all fell apart. Got it? Who doesn’t love a bit of Christmas Day Santa-themed trauma?!) there was a loud call for more The Grinch. On opening Netflix a games promo appeared, and these were games we could play on the TV using our phones.
Pictionary? Yes please. The Grinch had been banished, at least for a while. My four-year-old obviously doesn’t have her own phone (we’re not terrible parents), but she knows how to use an iPad better than I do, so we quickly fired up a three-player game (kids together as one team) and never looked back. This kind of setup has been done before (the Jackbox games offer great fun via a phone controller), but I’d not seen this directly integrated into a popular streaming service. Availability matters a lot, and the Netflix home screen has a lot of power. There’s nothing new in Pictionary on Netflix, it’s super stripped down to the basics of drawing and guessing with three categories for the words, but it was an instant and long-lasting hit in my house pretty much because of this ease of play. Lego Party, a game that’s a more traditional console gaming experience, was also a hit, albeit one that was a little too much for my four-year-old to manage. Boggle, the classic word-finding game, also worked a treat with the eldest, even tapping into the Netflix world to offer avatars based on popular films and shows, such as the members of K-Pop Demon Hunters’ Huntrix.
There are other games on offer that we’re yet to try out, but these three alone must have been played for more than 10 hours in the week following Christmas. They are, and maybe I need to hand over my gamer card, also the only games I played over the holiday. Maybe this says more about me than it does Netflix, but I do think this is the right direction for the firm. Games definitely used to be more welcoming to newcomers than they are today. We had EyeToy, Buzz, PlayStation Move, Kinect, Wii Remotes, and plastic guitars. Sony attempted to bring some of this back with a bunch of phone-controlled games on PS4 under the PlayLink banner (I enjoyed That’s You!), but these didn’t really reignite the casual gaming space and fizzled out.
In today’s world where getting attention is harder than ever, these kinds of games just fit better on Netflix – they’re there to jump into if you’ve got 10 minutes after watching a film, but also entertaining enough that they could become game night regulars. There’s no real barrier to entry, almost everyone can handle what’s being asked of them, and it’s all good fun. Well done Netflix, you’ve managed to do something the majority of other big, gaming-curious tech companies haven’t – you’ve made me care. Let’s see if anything more is built on the top of this promising start.