Netflix also confirms it is serious about cloud gaming
Darkness is falling, winter is coming, and it just feels like bad news all around for anyone who shares Netflix passwords. For months now, the company has been making a very public show of work towards helping people ditch password sharing and hopefully set up their own accounts. Netflix even just introduced a new tool to migrate your profile to a new account, helping to smooth over that transition. Now we’re starting to get a better picture of how this will all go down, as the service shares new details about sub-accounts in its latest earnings call.
Starting in early 2023, Netflix will let subscribers create accounts that exist under their own accounts, for use by people not in their immediate household (via The Verge). The arrangement could help subscribers continue sharing Netflix accounts, while still generating income for the company. Later, if people want to turn their shared sub-account into an independent standalone account, they could use the Profile Transfer tool. The streaming service intends to charge subscribers for these sub-accounts, discouraging password sharing without directly stopping it.
This has all been in the works for a while now. We saw Netflix testing sub-accounts in May this year in South and Central America. Although the testing created confusion, the results seem to have been promising. Netflix also dabbled with the idea of levying a flat fee if you let people in another household use your account.
On the earnings call, Netflix also mentioned it welcomed 2.4 million new subscribers onboard this quarter and operating income for the quarter stood at $1.5 billion, down from $1.8 billion in Q3 last year. The company took this opportunity to talk a little more about its intentions to enter the cloud gaming space. Thirty-five Netflix games are already making a big splash on Android and 55 more are in the works. With competition like Google Stadia dying, the market could be ready for a new service to fill its shoes. As we could already tell from the company’s gaming-related hiring efforts in August, Netflix is quite serious about its cloud gaming effort.
Game development VP Mike Verdu told Protocol that players won’t be doing anything like using their TV remotes as controllers, but he also refused to confirm if Stadia-style custom controllers were in the pipeline. He said the general approach will resemble Netflix Games’ careful and gradual progress on mobile. Verdu only notes the company is seriously exploring the possibility, and doesn’t offer a clear ETA for when we could get our first taste of a Netflix cloud gaming title.
