Netflix has launched a slew of mobile games since it announced its push into gaming last year, but most subscribers aren’t playing them yet.
According to data from app analytics company Apptopia (via CNBC), Netflix’s games have been downloaded 23.3 million times and are played by 1.7 million subscribers daily. That’s less than 1 percent of the 221 million people subscribed to Netflix worldwide.
This report comes as Netflix faces growing competition from other streaming platforms to retain subscribers. Netflix lost over a million subscribers in the second quarter after reporting a loss of 200,000 subscribers during the first quarter in April — its first decline in over a decade.
When Netflix Games launched in November 2021, it had a small offering of five games, including Stranger Things: 1984, Stranger Things 3: The Game, Shooting Hoops, Card Blast, and Teeter Up. The games catalog has since increased to over two dozen titles, including Poinpy, This is a True Story, Exploding Kittens: The Game, the League of Legends spinoff Hextech Mayhem, Into the Breach, and Before Your Eyes.
Netflix is currently working to add more games to its catalog, including The Queen’s Gambit chess game, a Shadow and Bone RPG, a “choose your own adventure” called Too Hot to Handle, and a heist game based on La Casa de Papel (or Money Heist). It aims to have 50 games on the platform by the end of the year. To hit that goal, it has acquired three indie game studios, including Boss Fight, Next Games (which already created games based on Stranger Things and The Walking Dead), and Night School Studio, the creator of Oxenfree.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.