Next Games has shipped seven titles and grown to 150 staff under Netflix

Next Games has launched seven games and grown from roughly 90-100 staff to 150 since Netflix acquired the Helsinki studio in 2022, managing director Saara Bergström told Pocket Gamer Connects Nordics last week.

Bergström, who joined the company early as CMO after its founding in May 2013, used the talk to account for four years of relative public silence. "Surprisingly enough they don't pay me for conference talks, they pay me for games," she said.

What changed with the acquisition?

Before Netflix bought it, Next Games built its name on licensed free-to-play mobile titles — The Walking Dead: No Man's Land and The Walking Dead: Our World — and had already worked with Netflix on Stranger Things: Puzzle Tales. The deal meant the studio had to abandon that playbook entirely.

"We needed to shed our skin from a lot of the old ways we had as free-to-play developers," Bergström said, along with "a lot of assumptions that we had in terms of how do games work, especially when you're working within a non-games company."

She described the past four years as "eventful": from a publicly listed free-to-play mobile developer with a knack for RPGs, Next Games became fully Netflix-owned with "a totally different business model, completely different context, a full 180 on our creative direction" — aimed now at a much more casual audience.

That pivot produced results, she argued, though without numbers attached. "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."

What is the studio's mandate inside Netflix?

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

Instead, each game carries a second objective for the streaming company. Every title tackles "at least one or two or sometimes three of the hardest problems that Netflix needs to resolve to make games work for Netflix" — technology challenges, engineering, new forms of collaboration between Netflix teams, or transmedia work.

The seven titles released since the acquisition span mobile and TV:

• Underwatermelon
• Netflix Star Daily Trivia, which Bergström hopes will expand outside the US soon
• Netflix Minigolf
• Netflix Puzzled
• Boggle Party
• Pictionary: Game Night
• Party Crashers

How is the studio structured now?

Next Games runs five internal development teams, a live operations team, and a platform team that supports every game from concepting through launch and live ops. It also works with two co-development partners in Helsinki, which support three of its live titles with content and further development.

The studio has also moved beyond pure mobile development into streaming games on the TV, a shift it began in 2023. Bergström framed TV as one step toward a bigger ambition: "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."

That goal, she argued, requires internal alignment a third party couldn't provide. "This is not something you can do from the outside. A third-party couldn't help us get there."

Working inside a non-games company also demanded internal education at Netflix — something that "sometimes takes a bit of patience if you come from an environment where you're used to taking all of this for granted."

What's next?

Near-term, Next Games "may or may not" have a launch toward the end of this year — Bergström left that deliberately vague. The firmer signal is 2027, when the studio has considerably more on its slate, with party games a "bigger focus" going forward. Watch that category: it's where Next Games is placing its next bet.