Over the summer Netflix began testing out a new feature in select markets that would make a number of mobile games available to Netflix subscribers on their mobile devices. There’s no additional cost for this, and anyone with an active Netflix subscription would be able to play the games on offer. Last week this new feature officially rolled out worldwide to Android devices, with Netflix promising that iOS support was coming soon. Given Apple’s attitude towards things like this, specifically all the stink they made when cloud gaming services like Xbox and Stadia were wanting to come to the App Store, I figured that iOS support would likely be a ways out for this new Netflix thing. Well, I was wrong! Starting today the 5 games that launched as part of the Android rollout last week are now available on iOS devices as well.
So how is Netflix getting away with this when all the cloud gaming services had to resort to web apps? Well, there’s nothing fancy going on here actually. Since Netflix’s offerings are only 5 games at this point, they’ve just followed Apple’s own guidelines and made them available individually in the App Store. You download these games just like you would any other game, but you’ll need to sign in with your Netflix subscription in order to play them. Also, starting tomorrow there will be a dedicated section for these games in the Netflix app and you’ll be able to launch them directly from there if you want too.
Interestingly, the 5 games to kick off this service are games that have already been released on the App Store before. Or at least 4 of the 5 are, I’m not totally sure about that fifth game. Unsurprisingly, given that it’s one of Netflix’s biggest properties, there’s two Stranger Things games in the lineup. Stranger Things: 1984 (Free) was released as Stranger Things: The Game back in October of 2017 and it was more or less a Legend of Zelda homage that was used as a promotional tool for the show. It was completely free and not bad at all for what it was. Then there’s Stranger Things 3: The Game (Free) which released as a premium $5 game back in August of 2019 and loosely followed the plot lines of the third season of the show. Both of these games were developed by Bonus XP.
Next is two games developed by long-time mobile developer Frosty Pop Corps. Shooting Hoops (Free) first launched in August of 2018 and is a clever game about using the propulsion of a dart gun attached to a basketball in order to make baskets. Then there’s Teeter (Up) (Free) which originally launched way back in June of 2016 and is about teetering a ball on a platform as you move the platform upwards without letting the ball fall off or hit any hazards. And the fifth and final game is called Card Blast! (Free) from Rogue Games & Amuzo that’s a poker-based puzzle card game that I think is new? Or if it has been released previously, I can’t find any trace of it.
So yeah, unfortunately all of the original releases of these games have been pulled from the App Store, replaced with the new Netflix-published versions. The bright side is that if you owned any of the originals they are still available to download from your purchase history in the App Store and as of now all of those original versions are still working and playable. Of course, should an iOS update break anything, well… I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. For anyone who is already a Netflix subscriber, this is a neat extra benefit that will hopefully only grow with even more games added down the line.
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