After initially disclosing plans in January to reimagine family game night for the TV screen, Netflix last week unveiled its initial suite of TV party games. Certain questions remain but Omdia sees the upcoming holiday season as the first meaningful test for the SVOD giant’s latest gaming effort, which aims to boost engagement on the platform with cloud-based games for the TV that don’t require dedicated hardware and use mobile phones as the controller.
Research and analysis firm Omdia recently released a report assessing Netflix’s and Amazon’s respective TV gaming strategies and StreamTV Insider spoke with Chief Analyst of Consumer Technologies & Services Rob Gallagher to dive a little deeper into Netflix’s latest gaming foray.
As we’ll get into, Gallagher thinks there are still some fundamental questions and challenges regarding the vision to bring low-cost, easy-to-play party games to the TV screen, but where the family-filled holiday season presents a great chance for Netflix to test and learn.
First, what’s available during the beta launch? TV Party Games in Netflix’s initial batch include classics like Boggle Party, Pictionary: Game Night, Party Crashers, and LEGO Party!
Coming soon is a social party game tied to IP with Dead Man’s Party: A Knives Out Game that lets players star and participate in their own Knives Out mystery.
A gap in the market, but questions remain
Initially only available in beta for select users and on select devices, a blog by Gallagher said that if Netflix is correct, the potential market for this type of gaming “could be huge.”
“There’s certainly a gap in the market,” Gallagher told StreamTV Insider in terms of people who game but don’t own hardware like gaming consoles.
Per survey data from Omdia’s Consumer Research Spotlight, about 25-40% of adults in major developed and developing markets say they regularly play games on smartphones, tablets or PCs but don’t own gaming consoles. Globally, that addressable audience “could run into the hundreds of millions, and potentially billions if they can convince non-gamers to play,” Gallagher wrote in the blog.
In terms of appetite for party games, the analyst told STV Insider they’re popular in the sense that Nintendo has built a very good business with a variety of party titles. But for consumers that option “has much higher costs to take up that kind of play” with the need to pay for hardware and games. There are also companies like JackBlox Games, which Gallagher said pioneered something similar to Netflix and Amazon and is “seeing reasonable success as well,” and to which Netflix Party Games could provide an alternative.
He noted numerous cloud gaming services have struggled to compete with consoles directly and believes Netflix’s primary target is consumers who enjoy playing games “but up until now, haven’t had the equipment or money to invest in playing console games,” and where Netflix could carve out a space for itself.
Netflix’s new TV party games come included with the streaming subscription and don’t cost extra to use or play. And while the analyst said it’s fine to say there could be a market for party games outside of what Nintendo offers, with lower cost and easier game play, he still questions the size of that market.
“It could be that Nintendo has captured a large amount of that,” he said, in terms of people who are interested in party games, and in turn will seek out and be prepared to pay for a sophisticated gaming product.
Still, the way Netflix itself has positioned and commented on the effort, it appears to hope the party games market is broader, such as a household with younger people who “might rope their parents into playing games,” Gallagher added.
The major question he sees is, “how big is the wider market?”
And based on Netflix executive comments and the style of games initially debuted, the company has made it clear it’s not looking to compete directly against gaming consoles and could be targeting a potential pool of people that enjoy board or party games (but don’t necessarily play only online), or those that might not be “gamers” but are looking for an alternate activity to do with friends and family on a given night.
Netflix held an event last week regarding the gaming efforts and here are some quotes as reported by The Hollywood Reporter that illustrate this:
“You can see why games on Netflix are going to be different. And let me be clear, we are not here to compete with consoles. We’re creating a completely new way to play games. One that’s as easy as streaming a show on a Friday night. ” said Netflix Games President Alain Tascan at a Netflix-hosted event covered by The Hollywood Reporter.
Additionally, Netflix Games VP Jeet Shroff at the event said, “Let’s say it’s Friday night, dinner’s done and you’re looking for something to do. Forget fumbling through that board game closet. Just open up Netflix.”
Again, the question remains how big that wider market is and what uptake will be like, but where holidays present a time for the most immediate results after launch.
Increasing North Star metric of time spent
Since scaling its business to more than 300 million subscribers globally, Netflix has put increased focus on engagement and a so-called North Star user metric of time spent as reflective of health of the business.
As mentioned, with Party Games Netflix is not looking to drive a new revenue stream at the onset (the games are included as part of a Netflix subscription) or necessarily attract a new pool of subscribers. Gallagher noted party games aren’t viewed as a meaningful subscriber acquisition tool and cited low consumer appetite for paying for game subscription services in general.
Omdia forecasts predict that even in five years, games subscription services will only account for 10% of total video game revenue, with the rest coming from transactional services like full game purchases, downloading extra episodes and paying for in-game items.
Instead, he thinks Netflix sees party games as a way to add value to users’ existing subscriptions and hopes it can increase engagement and contribute to the time spent metric relative to cost. But when it comes to time spent, Gallagher questions how much party games can meaningfully add.
How much can Netflix gain via Party Games?
In the analyst’s view, Netflix faces a potential hurdle in terms of games competing with its own core video offering and TV living room competition at large, where YouTube also continues to be a force.
And Gallagher cited an “almost a fundamental challenge” to the strategy in terms of how much Netflix can grow time spent with TV party games relative to the massive amount of viewing that TV and video generate.
Omdia did an earlier analysis of Netflix mobile game titles and found they drove an average 0.5% uplift in time spent after four years – a metric that again needs to be in context against the SVOD’s TV and movie viewing engagement.
“That’s a huge number in itself, which is very hard to compete with,” Gallagher said of TV show and movie viewing on Netflix.
TV and video viewing as a whole is large and growing, and while video games are popular, average time spent is significantly less. Per Activate Consulting’s Tech & Media Outlook 2026, U.S. adults on average spend an estimated 5 hours and 8 minutes on video each day, increasing by 17 minutes to 5:25 in 2029. Average daily time spent gaming is 1 hour and 59 minutes, which the firm expects to increase by four minutes to 2:03 in 2029.
According to Gallagher, given the market, a question is “how much is a game going to add?”
Related to that, another one of Omdia’s questions per the analyst, is “how much time should Netflix spend on this? Given there is so much more viewing and engagement to win on TV and video.” Whereas with games “there’s only so much you can gain,” he said, sans introducing a game-changing title like Fortnite that absorbs large amounts of time and engagement.
Going back to the mobile games for minute, Gallagher noted Netflix’s TV and movie catalog is 1000s of titles, while games there’s only hundreds. Here again, in his view, “it is harder to see how they can meaningfully increase that amount of time spent” relative to the large content library and viewing, although did note a small handful of mobile games drove high usage on par with better-performing content titles on the platform.
Still, given Netflix’s scale and saturation, one wonders how Netflix will measure success of Party Games and whether even smaller, incremental upticks in time spent via TV party games could be meaningful to the SVOD giant. Omdia didn’t have specific insight into that and Activate was not able to share data around how long an average Netflix user spends on the service per session, day or week.
To be sure, as Gallagher noted and Activate’s report shows, consumer time spent with video is large and increasing. For streaming video specifically, Activate estimates U.S. adults on average spend 3 hours 12 minutes per day, and predicts that to increase to 4 hours and 8 minutes by 2029.
Netflix itself regularly captures a roughly 8% share of monthly TV viewing time in its largest market of the U.S., a factor that co-CEO Ted Sarandos said during Q3 earnings means there’s still “enormous room for profitable growth in the core business.” In that regard it's focused on other long-term growth priorities like building up live events, including sports.
But there are still only 24 hours in a day, and if Netflix already benefits from a scaled base alongside high user engagement and longer viewing sessions, one could imagine a scenario where a consumer might not be willing to add another movie or TV show to their Friday or evening media diet, but might be interested in an alternate activity like playing a co-op or party game with family or friends.
While not zeroing in on Netflix specifically, Activate’s report on Americans’ tech and media consumption habits also expects that “to capture more consumer time, companies will extend their user propositions and expand their roles in people’s lives” – which to this writer, is something Netflix appears to be doing with TV party games.
Challenge for party games to compete against TV
Although one can imagine in theory an appetite for a TV party game activity, it’s an area where Gallagher sees another challenge in the ability for TV party games "to compete against TV itself."
Those that have purchased gaming consoles have made a conscious decision to do so and on a given night may choose to play a game instead of watch TV, he reasoned. On the other hand, Gallagher thinks the rest of the market, which may or may not be interested in games, typically turn on their TV with the default behavior of “a very passive, lean-back experience." That's a habit Netflix's on-demand nature helped cultivate and could be a barrier in the sense that party games require friends or family to come together and choose to actively play rather than veg out.
“The challenge for TV party games is how do they compete in that, how big is the market for people who do want to come home and experience something different [than watching TV],” he said.
One solution Gallagher and Omdia advised in a June report on the Netflix party games effort is "to invest in licensing or developing IP and marketing aimed at bringing families and friends together, perhaps around live or time-limited events that create a sense of community and 'fear of missing out.'"
That would also follow a similar strategy Netflix has taken to build up live events programming and looks to have come about with Netflix's recent disclosure about a weekly game show called Best Guess Live, hosted by Howie Mandel and Hunter March that lets mobile game players tune in to make guesses and have the chance to win cash prizes.
It's a different approach than party games and the interaction takes place on mobile, but Gallagher on LinkedIn noted the firm's same point stands, writing "The streamer needs to create new reasons for people to engage with its games and shift perceptions of its service."
Holidays tee up test and learn
The upcoming holiday season could shed some light for Netflix to test and learn about its TV party games foray.
Gallagher noted Netflix is a very smart, data-driven company that always iterates and tries to understand what’s working and what’s not.
“If there is an opportunity to open a window where people will start playing these games, it’s during this time,” he said.
As Gallagher described, other times of the year people may work, come home and see Netflix games available but not be in the mood to play. But holidays tend to mean a lot more family time and potentially seeking out activities to play together. Omdia’s also spoken with other companies that have provided cloud-based game services, and per Gallagher the consensus is that play is “really highly concentrated around holiday seasons.”
So, “that really presents an opportunity for those games to have a great test of how popular they might be, or at least how people play with them, how they take to them,” he said.
The analyst also thinks it will be a test to see if playing games on the TV using a smartphone as a controller is a good or as satisfying experience compared to the very tactile experience that’s delivered through consoles with dedicated controllers, and how it compares to playing directly on a mobile screen.
Now while he believes Netflix will learn a lot about TV party games during this period “that doesn’t mean that’s going to translate into gameplay after the holiday season.”
The same amount of family-focused holiday gaming might not carry over, and Gallagher thinks the SVOD giant will be looking at what it learned and parlay that into what “to do at the next opportunity to really pry open this door for TV party gaming.”
Another aspect he thinks Netflix will be looking to see is how party games do in terms of return on investment and how it might drive some incremental gains in time spent relative to cost.
In Omdia’s latest report, which also delves into aspects like licensing and monetizing, the firm has said Netflix “can afford to keep experimenting with games” – one because the company’s core video results are still really strong and “the cost for games is going to be much lower than the cost of TV and video.”
The game has to be good
When it comes to success, Netflix has tried various strategies including mobile games and tying games to content IP where it sees opportunity to deepen connection with storylines and games that play off and boost each other, and now party games.
Albeit slightly different approaches, the analyst noted “it’s all towards driving engagement” and figuring out ultimately what works. And where the one answer to success Omdia has seen is “it has to be a great game.”
Based on the firm’s analysis with engagement of Netflix titles, Gallagher noted there can be a hugely popular TV show or movie, but unless the game is really good, it’s unlikely to make a big splash.
“IP is important and might help you get your foot in the door, but it has to be a really great game to succeed,” he said.
“I think you can see the party games strategy as an extension of that,” Gallagher said, with Netflix turning to enduring games like Boggle and Pictionary that are “time worn classics.”
Netflix’s work to bring family game night to the TV screen is underway, time will tell how many consumers want to play.