Netflix has offered access to a selection of games through its mobile applications on smartphones for years already, and now it’s finally making a selection of titles available to play on the big screen.
The company has announced it’s kicking things off with five titles that can all be found on the Netflix TV app, with a sixth game called “Dead Man’s Party: A Knives Out Game”, set to be added to the lineup in the coming weeks.
Note that these are not your typical console games. Rather, the first five titles are all party games that are meant to be played socially with your family or a group of friends. For instance, LEGO Party! is said to be a collection of “hilarious minigames” that involve competing against each other to hunt for gold in various themed Challenge Zones. Meanwhile, Boggle Party is said to be a race against the clock to try and find words hidden in a jumbled up grid of letters – basically a TV-style wordsearch, which supports up to eight players at once.
There’s also Pictionary: Game Night, which is said to be a new take on the classic sketchy-style group game, and Tetris Time Warp, where players will travel back in time to different eras of the classic Gameboy hit. Finally, Party Crashers: Fool Your Friends is a kind of mystery game where one of the individuals present has secretly crashed the party – the group has to figure out who the intruder is.
As for Dead Man's Party: A Knives Out Game, this will be added soon. As the name suggests, it’s a classic murder mystery or Cluedo-style game that features the world famous detective Benoit Blanc, who rocks up to a busy house where a murder has just been committed. It’s a group game where everyone present is a suspect, but only one player will be designated as the guilty party. The group has to work together to figure out who the killer is, while at the same time, the killer must pretend to be innocent and convince everyone else that someone else is guilty.
Netflix said these party games will appear under a new “Games” tab on the main menu, but only if you live in a supported region and your TV is also supported. For now, the games are limited to users in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Spain, Mexico, France, Italy, Poland, Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Ireland, Finland, Germany, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. More regions will get access to the games later.
Netflix provided a fairly long list of supported devices, including Amazon Fire TV devices and smart TVs, Chromecast with Google TV, Roku devices and TVs, Nvidia Shield boxes, Xfinity 4k devices, LG smart TVs, Samsung smart TVs, Sony smart TVs, Vizio smart TVs and Xumo devices and TVs.
Unfortunately that means quite a few devices and televisions are excluded. Netflix games won’t be accessible on millions of TVs sold by Panasonic, Philips, Hisense, TCL and others, nor the Apple TV or Playstation or Xbox consoles. At least not yet. You’ll also need to download the Netflix Game Controller app on a smartphone to be able to play the games. Physical controllers are not supported at this time.
Still, things may change, for Netflix has been constantly tweaking its gaming strategy since it started – opening and closing game design studios, adding and removing various mobile games and so on – as it tries to work out what’s successful.
The company didn’t talk about the prospect of bringing more ambitious games, like Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, to the TV platform. These titles can be played on the Netflix mobile app with some devices, but bringing them to smart TVs would be quite a challenge. However, it maintains it does have long term ambitions for TV gaming, so the prospect remains that it may happen one day.
