Higher quality TV and movies? No. A standard of not cancelling shows after a single season? Nah. Mobile games on your TV? Yup. That appears to be Netflix's plan after a developer found some hidden code while digging through the platform. The company's actually been offering games on mobile since 2021, but given paltry player numbers, the effort to bring them to TVs, where most subscribers actually use Netflix, might be the best way to remind people that they're even there.
App developer Steve Moser—who shared his findings with Bloomberg—found some sneaky lines of code during some digging into Netflix's back end. One line of the code allegedly read "A game on your TV needs a controller to play. Do you want to use this phone as a game controller?," indicating that a user's smartphone would serve as the controller for a game hosted on Netflix's interface.
Currently, Netflix's gaming service is relegated to mobile, and while there's critically acclaimed titles like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge and Immortality in there, you can only get at them either by stumbling on Netflix's games on your phone's app store or through a single row in the Netflix app. As such, it's easy to miss out on this side of Netflix entirely. According to recent data, only one percent of subscribers are playing games on Netflix.
[...] It's not nearly as robust a service as Xbox Game Pass or even competitor Amazon's Luna, but the library's breadth and quality is roughly on par with Apple Arcade and is admittedly a nice bonus on top of your subscription that's easy to miss, if a confusing direction for the company—we're not sure anybody should subscribe to Netflix for the games, at least right now.
By putting its games on TVs, Netflix could boost their discoverability and maybe make its gaming branch more of a legitimate selling point. The code's reference to using a phone as a controller does imply that the move would still be limited to Netflix's current mobile game lineup, which would still leave it behind more robust console selections from competing game services, but would also keep the service lightweight and allow it to be played across more platforms, as it does not currently rely on streaming from the cloud. We are curious, though, if Netflix will allow for more traditional controllers in games that support them.
(Score: 0, Troll) by VLM on Friday March 31, @03:43PM (4 children)
Are the games woke? This is netflix after all.
If so, nobody's going to play them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 31, @06:44PM
Nobody was playing them in the first place. Maybe they should bring porn games to the TV.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 01, @01:04PM (2 children)
Just give it up, they're not going to let you play as the Nazi hero in Wolfenstein, so stop asking.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 02, @12:54PM (1 child)
Then it won't be killing the nazis it will be capturing them to take them to transformation camps to teach them how to be better people. In later missions, you help the reformed nazis "escape" from the camps (wink wink, nudge nudge), get on a boat, travel to other countries, to live out their lives peacefully in coexistence with the country of their choice after burning through the supplies and cash given to them for the journey and tearing up their identification documents in a ceremonial fire of sanctification.
Just like it is in real life.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 02, @01:07PM
The ending credits of the game shows the settled in reformed citizens of this peaceful country gathering together on street corners baying for the blood of the cowards who pay for their shelter and food who refuse to join their religion. At nights the reformed peace loving war hating new citizens run around the streets to mug people, break into houses, and blow up people they dislike [wikipedia.org], play with the locals [gatestoneinstitute.org] and inject their culture to the landscape for others to come and enjoy [gatestoneinstitute.org].
This all seems so familiar. It's like it plays out in real life every day.