Netflix Party Games marks the streamer's latest unconvincing push into gaming

Netflix may continue to dominate the world of streaming, but when it comes to games, it isn’t moving the needle.

By Elijah Gonzalez  |  December 1, 2025 | 7:00am
Image credits: Netflix
Games Features Netflix
Netflix Party Games marks the streamer's latest unconvincing push into gaming

So far, Netflix’s attempts at getting into the games business have been a bit of a mess. The streamer announced plans to work its way into the industry back in 2021, and later that year put out a thin lineup of mobile titles for the service to an indifferent response. Undeterred by this initial lack of buzz, it would continue adding to its collection in the coming years. The result? A surprisingly impressive stable of iOS and Android ports: the hit roguelike Dead Cells, the BAFTA-winner Before Your Eyes, the all-timer strategy roguelite Into The Breach, and perhaps most unexpected of all, the magical realist adventure game Kentucky Route Zero. In a model that resembles Apple Arcade, these titles are available to download on the App Store with a subscription. According to Netflix’s website, it currently has over 80 titles available.

However, with the impressive lineup, the initiative did not pan out, and as of 2022, less than 1% of Netflix users had tried games on the service. Earlier this year, 20 games were removed, including some of its best, like Hades, Katana Zero, The Case Of The Golden Idol, and Monument Valley. Meanwhile, it also cancelled several mobile ports like Crashlands 2 and Tales Of The Shire. Between its almost total lack of marketing and the seeming unpopularity of cramming games originally designed for console and PC games onto small smartphone screens, Netflix Games has had a rough run of it. This very much lines up with the struggles that many other non-gaming-focused tech companies have had while trying to enter the space, such as Amazon, which recently wound down most of its gaming divisions, including its MMO New World.

But seemingly undeterred from this string of failures, two weeks ago Netflix announced the latest wave of Netflix Games: a Red Dead Redemption mobile port is slated for December, and a daily puzzle app themed around many of its originals is planned for later this month. As for what’s out now, they also released Netflix Party Games, which includes five games tailored for get-togethers that can be played directly on TVs using a smartphone as a controller. It should be noted that there are a few other non-party game titles launching with the initiative, like a not-very-good version of Missile Command, where you point your phone at the screen to aim anti-ballistics, but based on the branding and messaging, it’s clear these party games are the focus. Basically, if Netflix’s previous mobile focus was aimed at toppling Apple Arcade, then this latest attempt is competing with the Jackbox Party Packs of the world.

On some level, the move makes sense: many more people are watching Netflix on TVs rather than their phones. By placing the games directly in the Netflix app that most viewers are using, these games are way easier to find than when you had to sift through the App Store in hopes of finding something covered under a Netflix subscription. However, having trotted out Netflix Party Games at a family get-together, these offerings are fairly unconvincing. The short version is that of the games in the initial selection, they largely either feel targeted at a more casual audience, but are a bit too bland, or are aimed at more traditional console players, but don’t measure up to the best party games on those platforms.

To start with the setup process (aka, the first barrier to entry), each player scans a QR code shown in the Netflix app on a TV, which pairs their phone to work as a controller for what’s shown on the TV. Depending on the game, there are a few different control methods available, with some utilizing a simple vertical layout that treats your phone more like a TV remote, while others use a more traditional horizontal layout with touchscreen buttons that simulate a game console controller.

While the pairing process seems like it should have been straightforward in theory, in practice, there were some bugs. At least one person would tend to have a controller syncing issue where the screen indicated that they would eventually automatically connect when the game started, only for this to never actually happen, forcing them to quit and try again. These kinds of issues will hopefully be ironed out, as the games are apparently in “Beta” at the moment, but especially for less tech-literate folks, this will be a problem up front.

As for the games themselves, here’s the selection: Boggle Party, Pictionary: Game Night, Tetris Time Warp, LEGO Party, and Party Crashers: Fool Your Friends. These are party games, if you didn’t get the memo. Out of the bunch, Boggle Party landed the best, in large part because it turns out that Boggle is still a very good game 50 years later. For those who haven’t played in a while (or ever), players attempt to spell as many words as they can from a randomized grid of letters. With Wordle-mania still in full swing, it’s easy to imagine many are eager to trot out their thesaurus-like vocabularies, and Boggle very much lets you do that.

Playing the game in this digital format also streamlined the experience, with the touch screen interface working perfectly with tracing out words, as it lets you know in real time if a word is real or something you made up. When a round ends, the computer magically handles all the point tabulations for you, removing the tedium. Add in some fun presentation around how the scoring is revealed, with players trading first place as it slowly calculates everyone’s scores, and this is a fairly definitive way to play the game.

In a similar vein, Pictionary: Game Night is another oldie: players take turns drawing pictures and guessing other players’ drawings to gain points. However, while this is another longstanding classic for a reason, this version doesn’t take as much advantage of its format. Specifically, it would have been nice if the Netflix edition had microphone support, automatically triggering when players guess the right word, and so on. Instead, this is a simplified take that ditches the board game aspect of the experience and doesn’t add much besides the ribbing that comes from how terrible pictures drawn on a smartphone look.

After this, there was a pretty steep decline, taking things from “this is a fun get-together,” to “Uh oh, we’d better wrap this up so everyone can go back to using Netflix for watching TV shows.” Tetris Time Warp is an unimpressive version of the beloved puzzle game that will be too challenging for those who aren’t used to game controllers, while also ticking off purists—like any game with touchscreen buttons, there’s a lack of tactile feedback you’d get from a controller that will make Tetris heads wish they were holding a Game Boy instead of an iPhone.

And here we start to see a more fundamental problem with this tech that lets you control Netflix games via your phone: the latency between the smartphone controllers and TV makes any more action-oriented experience feel sluggish. It probably doesn’t help that most televisions will struggle with anything remotely graphically intensive, something that was on display with the next game, LEGO Party.

As its name suggests, this is a Mario Party imitator, one that ties into the previously mentioned problems. While its game show presentation earned a handful of chuckles, this minigame fest was too complicated for those who don’t actively play video games, while not offering enough for those who are. As much as Mario Party’s board game modes can stoke the burning rage of a thousand suns, at least many of its minigames are clever, unique, and frantic. By comparison, these were boring and unimaginative: there was one that was sort of just Flappy Bird, and another I could have sworn was from a now-unplayable Flash game. Lastly, there’s Party Crashers: Fool Your Friends, which proved uninteresting enough in premise to the guests that it went unplayed. It’s a social deduction game that doesn’t stand out from the Avalons, Coups, and Werewolfs of the world, some of which you can already play on your phone for free.

Maybe the most confusing part of Netflix’s latest gaming push to the big screen is that these new additions don’t seem to be playable on game consoles at the moment (or at least not the PS5), where they would be a natural fit. Maybe they could have made some of the mobile ports playable on TVs with controller support, or at least allowed beefier gaming machines to handle some of these party games to reduce the input latency. While the target audience here is obviously on the more casual side, it still feels like a waste of potential and shows how limited the aims of this effort are.

So, where does this leave Netflix’s gaming division? Honestly, pretty much in the same place it was before, a confusing and half-hearted endeavor that probably doesn’t have much chance at muscling in to a brutal video game business that gets more cutthroat by the day. Netflix may continue to dominate the world of streaming, but when it comes to games, it isn’t moving the needle.

 
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