It wasn’t that long ago that Netflix lead the charge in disrupting the traditional television and film markets. With them being the first to go head-on into streaming, they have since changed those marketplaces into something radically different than what they were just 10 years ago. The same is about to happen to gaming potentially, but it seems for this transformation, Netflix is staying in their lane.
Talking about the New York Times’ DealBook Conference, CEO Reed Hastings said there was no plans to try and get into the gaming streaming business with a similar service to their current one for TV and movies. While he does consider games a competition in the sense of limited time for consumers, he thinks it’s best if Netflix stays to what they know.
“There are a lot of other things people do to entertain themselves, including Fortnite. And the original quote was that we compete with Fortnite more than we compete with HBO. Fortnite gets a lot more hours of viewing. Ultimately it’s about competing for those hours of viewing. But we don’t compete with Fortnite better by doing something like [a streaming service for games] because we’re not very good at that. We compete by doing the most amazing TV shows you’ve ever seen, so you put down Fortnite and you come to watch our shows.”
Netflix has expanded in bits and pieces into games, mostly on smaller budget titles based on their original properties. It seems they aren’t ready just yet to go bigger than that, but considering how every major gaming company is getting into streaming, you can’t blame them.