Netflix’s Warner Bros. Games question, Twitch’s audience boom, and Pikmin Bloom’s big year | Week in Views
The games industry moves quickly and while stories may come and go there are some that we just can't let go of…
So, to give those particularly thorny topics a further going over we've created a weekly digest where the members of the PocketGamer.biz team share their thoughts and go that little bit deeper on some of the more interesting things that have happened in mobile gaming in the past week.
Craig Chapple
Netflix set to acquire Warner Bros. in $82.7bn deal
The week has finished with a bang: Netflix is acquiring Warner Bros., and its game studios, in an $82.7 billion deal.
Top line: It brings lots of interesting IP into Netflix and kills off a streaming rival.
But I worry about the future of the game studios being snapped up. Some fit their focus areas announced earlier this year: games for kids (TT Games), games with widespread appeal, narrative games tied to Netflix IP (Avalanche, NetherRealm, Rocksteady), and multiplayer party games (??).
The problem is platform and investment. Netflix has already been pushing out of console/PC. The firm closed internal triple-A studio Team Blue last year.
Now it's just bought some developers that specialise in making games for these systems.
At least these teams are experienced and ready-made, with NetherRealm, Rocksteady and Avalanche tied closely to the IPs it's getting.
We'll see if Netflix can bring it all together, if it even wants to. Notably, games wasn't mentioned in the big announcement from Netflix.
Paige Cook
Twitch hits 21m streamers with billions of hours watched in 2025
It has been an interesting journey for Twitch since its beginnings as Justin.tv. Despite challengers like YouTube Live, Kick and can you remember Microsoft's short-lived Mixer? Of course, YouTube has a broader audience, but Twitch has remained the big go-to for live games content.
Twitch holds a strong position for game discovery too, looking at a recent example being Arc Raiders. Yes, it has become very popular in its own right, but I’ve seen plenty of people pick this game up as a direct knock-on effect of watching someone play it on Twitch. Games like this gain so much more traction because of the community that builds around them.
For all its scale, dominance, and reach among gamers, there is still plenty of debate about the platform's profitability though. If Amazon hadn't acquired it back in 2014, I wonder if Twitch would be around today.
Amazon uses Twitch as part of a broader strategy to push the likes of Prime Gaming, and it gets to ensure that a large portion of gamers are active within its own ecosystem.
But at the same time, Amazon's expectations for Twitch have shifted in recent years, which has resulted in huge layoffs last year and more this year.
Despite the platform holding a very dominant position in the space it takes up, it still doesn't have the most sustainable long-term plan and I wonder what the strategy is for the years to come.
Aaron Astle
Pikmin Bloom hits $100m after four years as 2025 becomes its best year yet
Pikmin Bloom hit $100 million in lifetime player spending this week. According to AppMagic estimates, the figure was achieved between the App Store and Google Play on December 1st, one month on from the geolocation game’s fourth anniversary.
One of Niantic’s location-based games, and bought by Scopely alongside Pokémon Go and Monster Hunter Now earlier this year, Pikmin Bloom started off modestly by comparison. But it has continued to grow every year since its 2021 release.
2023 was when things really picked up, with Bloom benefiting from Pikmin 4’s release as the first main series game in 10 years. But, perhaps more than that, it benefited from the constant tweaks and improvements made by its dev teams, tapping into stronger monetisation opportunities with the Event Premium Pass, Mystery Boxes, Community Days and more.
Last year, the game even scaled up to a level where in-person events became viable, and now under Scopely, Bloom’s monthly revenue is closing in on Monster Hunter Now’s too.
It seems walking games and Japanese IP really do go hand-in-hand.
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