Netflix Vice President of Game Development Mike Verdu announced the streaming service's intention to acquire Finnish studio Next Games for €65 million. They'll close the deal in the second quarter of the year.
Next Games was founded in 2013 and is led by Teemu Huuhtanen. In 2020, the studio earned €27.2 million, 95% of which came from in-game purchases.
During its existence, Next Games has managed to release mobile entertainment such as Stranger Things: Puzzle Tales, The Walking Dead: Our World, and The Walking Dead: No Man's Land.
Although we are just beginning our gaming journey, I am confident that with Next Games we will create a library of top notch games – without ads and microtransactions – that will delight our users around the world,” said Verdu.
The acquisition of Next Games is not Netflix's first move into gaming. Previously, the streaming giant bought Night School Studio (Oxenfree, Afterparty) and gave subscribers access to a selection of mobile projects.
Netflix has begun testing Fast Laughs on smart TV apps. In fact, this is a TikTok-style platform that has a selection of short, funny 30-second videos from movies and series on the platform that will help viewers choose what they want to watch.
The feature is available to a limited number of users in “selected English-speaking countries”; Including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. The Fast Laughs section is available at the bottom of the service's homepage. By opening the selection, you can see excerpts from popular movies and series of the platform; Such as “Army of the Dead”, “Big Mouth”, comedian Jerry Seinfeld shows, and much more. Navigation through videos is done by arrows on the left and right sides of the screen; It is possible to add a movie or series to the watch list or immediately open its page.
Fast Laughs compilations are not created by viewers, but by Netflix management, and the platform's recommendation algorithms don't work here - videos are shown regardless of user preferences. In a sense, this is good, because you can discover something really unexpected and new. The functionality is only available to adult users of the platform; A warning is displayed before the group is launched.
Remember, just under a year ago, Fast Laughs collections appeared in the Netflix mobile app; Where it is most similar to TikTok is with vertical videos. You can “like” the videos on your phone by clicking the “LOL” button, or share them with friends.
