Skip to main content

Netflix is building its own internal video game studio in Finland

Netflix has announced that it is building an in-house mobile games studio for Netflix Games in Helsinki, Finland.

Amir Rahimi, Netflix’s VP of Games Studios, said in a press release Monday that Finland is the perfect place for Netflix Games to call home, as it is the birthplace of “some of the best game talent in the world,” such as Angry Birds creator Rovio and Next Games. Netflix acquired the latter studio earlier this year.

Recommended Videos

The internal games studio will be the fourth studio for Netflix, along with Next Games, Night School Studio, and Boss Fight Entertainment, and it will be led by former Zynga co-founder and manager Marko Lastikka. The company said that each studio will be tasked with developing games catering to different tastes. However, its studio and its games will take some time to build.

“It’s still early days, and we have much more work to do to deliver a great games experience on Netflix,” Rahimi said. “Creating a game can take years, so I’m proud to see how we’re steadily building the foundation of our games studios in our first year, and look forward to sharing what we produce in the coming years.”

Netflix Games launched last year in an effort to push into the mobile gaming market. Its games library has more than two dozen titles, including Poinpy, Before Your Eyes, Stranger Things: 1984, This Is A True Story, Into the Breach, and the League of Legends spin-off Hextech Mayhem. It aims to have 50 tiles by the end of the year.

Cristina Alexander
Cristina Alexander has been writing since 2014, from opining about pop culture on her personal blog in college to reporting…
Rockstar Games’ co-founder just formed an ‘absurd’ new studio
A man drives away in a boat with stolen money in Grand Theft Auto 5 art.

Dan Houser, a co-founder of Rockstar Games and one of the people behind the creation of series like Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, has unveiled his new studio, Absurd Ventures.

Dan Houser was a stalwart figure at Rockstar Games since its founding and had a hand in the creative aspects of pretty much every game in the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption series, along with other titles like Bully and Max Payne 3. Following an "extended break" following the release of Red Dead Redemption 2, as well as some controversy surrounding some reported issues with the game's creative development, Rockstar Games' parent company Take-Two Interactive announced that Houser had left the company in early 2020. He's had a relatively low-profile since then outside of serving on the board of a blockchain company, but now looks to be fully invested in Absurd Ventures, a company he technically founded in 2021.
Absurd Ventures is finally being revealed more publicly now, and Houser did so with an intentionally absurd announcement trailer and website with the tagline "Storytelling, Philanthropy, Ultraviolence." According to a tweet by Geoff Keighley, the actual main goal of Absurd Ventures is "building narrative worlds, creating characters, and writing stories for a diverse variety of genres, without regard to medium, to be produced for live-action and animation, video games and other interactive content, books, graphic novels, and scripted podcasts."
Absurd Ventures
It seems like Houser wants to make a creative think tank that can craft ideas that are then realized in a variety of creative mediums. It doesn't seem quite like any other game developer or movie studio out there, so it will be very interesting to see what the minds at Absurd Ventures are eventually able to come up with.

Read more
Starfield looks like the culmination of every Bethesda game
Starfield astronaut on moon

The Xbox Games Showcase and Starfield Direct have come and gone, culminating with over 45 minutes of new gameplay footage of the upcoming spacefaring RPG, which is also Bethesda Game Studios' first new IP in over 25 years.

Buckle up, because the new information dropped by Bethesda's entire development team is an interstellar jump from the meager offerings we received during 2022's Xbox Games Showcase. Almost all of Starfield's galaxy-spanning game systems have now been shown off in much fuller detail, from extensive character customization and context-rich dialogue to gravity-defying combat, shipbuilding, and planetary exploration.

Read more
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 finally gets its fall release date at Summer Game Fest
Spider-Man Peter Parker and Miles Morales fighting Kraven and henchmen

Marvel's Spider-Man 2 officially has a release date. During the Summer Game Fest, Insomniac Games revealed that the game is scheduled to release on October 20 as a PlayStation 5 exclusive. The stream also featured a few new details about the game, including new information about its villains.

Spider-Man 2 recently appeared at the May 2023 PlayStation Showcase, so it wasn't surprising that there wasn't any new footage at the Summer Game Fest. However, Insomniac presented new concept art, including one with Peter Parker and Miles Morales fighting side by side and another with the two Spider-Mans fighting Venom.

Read more