Even Hades couldn’t save Netflix Games. Is mobile gaming doomed?

For the longest time, the iPhone was my favourite games platform. In fact, I considered it the greatest gaming device I’d ever owned. Which probably sounds bonkers if you’ve spent your life welded to an Xbox or PlayStation gamepad. But for me, mobile gaming rekindled something I’d long felt lost. These days, though, Netflix Games has me wondering if mobile gaming’s magic is gone for good.

Let’s rewind. My formative gaming years were during the 8-bit era. People donning rose-tinted specs would have you believe everything back then was amazing and new. It wasn’t. The market was rife with rip-offs. You’d see games like Munch Man that featured a legally dubious yellow blob eating dots and evading monsters. But the industry was young and IP owners hadn’t yet learnt to throw lawyers at pretenders.

Still, it was also a golden age of experimentation, in part because so little had come before. Combined with the severe limitations of early platforms, you had an industry where game creators were freed to get weird. And they often did. It was dizzying, chaotic, and properly exciting.

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As the years rolled by, I grew more jaded. Part of that’s just getting older. But I’d look at a PlayStation and wonder whether everything really had to be in 3D. And as creator teams and budgets ballooned, it felt like creative risks were sidelined. 

I still bought consoles. My beloved Dreamcast. An Xbox that may as well have had its disc tray welded shut once the magnificent OutRun 2 was safely inside. But it was handhelds that reawakened my love of gaming, especially when they did something that dared to be different.

The GBA was a SNES in disguise but nonetheless gave rise to deeply weird games like Rhythm Tengoku and WarioWare: Twisted! The DS was mocked by people for daring to be inclusive, but I loved how it blew up convention with its stylus and touchscreen. And then the iPhone arrived, and it was only a touchscreen.

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For games, the lack of conventional controls was a problem. Yet smart devs embraced limitations, just as they had in gaming’s earliest days. In Apple terms, they really did “think different”. Gradually, though, enthusiasm was chipped away from creators and players alike as app stores trained everyone that mobile games should be free-to-play IAP-infested monstrosities. Buzz was killed in the name of whales and giants.

The last throw of the dice has been mobile gaming as a service. Apple Arcade pitched itself as an HBO Max of gaming before freaking out about retention and heavily pivoting towards casual games with IAPs ripped out. Then Netflix Games, lurking for years, made an audacious play. Included with even the cheapest subscription, it pulled in original titles, Netflix tie-ins, and big names. Street Fighter. Civilization. Braid. Monument Valley. Hades. GTA. Football Manager. World of Goo. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And, er, Hello Kitty.

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On paper? Brilliant. In practice? Not enough. Over the past year, Netflix Games has had a tumultuous time, shedding and cancelling games. This week, What’s on Netflix reported a full fifth of the library is being pulled, including Monument Valley – which only launched on the service in December – and Hades, one of its best games.

Turns out, Netflix is not immune to churn in games any more than films and TV shows. And with devs long cool on mobile and ‘all you can eat’, I wonder what’s next. For Netflix, the linked report suggests the company will perform its own pivot – to ‘big screen’ games and away from mobile releases, which will be confined to occasional, safe, predictable fare for casual gaming and kids. Sound familiar?

Because, ultimately, it always comes back to money. Players don’t want to pay for mobile games. Publishers and services are tired of footing the bill for prestige titles no one notices. 

12 years ago, I warned on this very site that if we don’t pay for what we love, we’ll be left with garbage. On mobile, we’re nearly there, knee-deep in shovelware, and waving goodbye to the good stuff.

• Related: The best Apple Arcade games to give you an instant gaming hit