How Next Games adapted to a new direction after the Netflix acquisition

Finnish developer Next Games has expanded to 150 staff and launched seven games since it was acquired by streaming giant Netflix.

Speaking at Pocket Gamer Connects Nordics last week, Next Games managing director Saara Bergström opened up exactly on what the studio has been up to in the four years since it was bought.

“Surprisingly enough they don’t pay me for conference talks, they pay me for games,” she said, highlighting the developer's relative lack of public activity in recent years.

The studio was founded in May 2013, with Bergström joining early on as the company’s CMO. Next Games found success with licensed free-to-play mobile games such as The Walking Dead No Man’s Land and The Walking Dead: Our World. Prior to Netflix’s acquisition, the team worked with the streaming firm for Stranger Things: Puzzle Tales.

The job now is not to continue where it left off, but do something new.

“Our job as a first-party studio is not to fill a catalogue, it is not to fill the shelves with lots of products. Our focus is really on the quality, not the quantity,” explained Bergström.

“Every single game that we make of course needs to be a delightful, fun experience that serves the audience that we’re creating these games for, but it also has an ulterior motive. So we always take at least one or two or sometimes three of the hardest problems that Netflix needs to resolve to make games work for Netflix.

“Whether that’s a technology challenge, whether that’s a new type of collaboration between different teams at Netflix, whether that’s engineering, transmedia, creative and so on and so forth.”

Next Games expansion

The studio has launched seven games since joining Netflix, available across mobile and TV. These include Underwatermelon, Netflix Star Daily Trivia - which she hopes will expand outside of the US soon - Netflix Minigolf, Netflix Puzzled, Boggle Party, Pictionary: Game Night and Party Crashers.

Next Games currently employs 150 staff, growing from around 90 to 100 it had at the time of the Netflix acquisition. The studio has five internal development teams, a live operations team, a platform team for supporting all games from concepting all the way to launch and live ops. It also works with two co-development partners in its local Helsinki, who support three of its live titles with content and further development.

Part of the changes at Next Games over the years have seen the studio move from pure mobile development to streaming games on the TV, a journey it started in 2023.

“We’re eventually looking to blur the boundaries between different entertainment formats, between film, series, games, live, you name it, everything that Netflix is stepping into. And this of course needs to have a very deep internal alignment between teams. This is not something you can do from the outside. A third-party couldn’t help us get there.”

On the company’s journey inside Netflix, Bergström described the past four years as “eventful”.

“We’ve gone from a publicly listed free-to-play mobile games developer with a knack for RPGs into a fully Netflix-owned, fully part of the Netflix family, totally different business model, completely different context, a full 180 on our creative direction in terms of who we make these games for - a much more casual audience.

"And all that while we’ve actually created some actual value and tangible results. Meaning not only the number of games, the seven games that we made, but the actual numbers that these games bring in, which I’m not able to disclose, so you’ll have to take my word for it.”

Bergström added: “We needed to shed our skin from a lot of the old ways we had as free-to-play developers, a lot of assumptions that we had in terms of how do games work, especially when you’re working within a non-games company. There’s a lot of education that we set out to do internally at Netflix and that sometimes takes a bit of patience if you come from an environment where you’re used to taking all of this for granted.”

Moving forward, Next Games “may or may not” have a game launch coming up toward the end of the year. For 2027, Bergström said it had a lot more on its slate, particularly in the party games category, a “bigger focus” for the studio at present.