Netflix said in its first-quarter earnings in April that "gaming will be an important form of entertainment," and a month later told TechRadar that it is "excited to be doing more interactive entertainment," and is preparing to enter this field itself He suggested that he was preparing to move into this field himself. And last week, the company took a serious step in that direction by hiring former Oculus VP of content Mike Verdu as VP of game development.

It's clear that Netflix is committed to the cause, but as we noted at the time, its actual plans beyond "doing games" were not entirely clear. However, thanks to the Q2 letter to shareholders released today, we have some clarity on this point.

"We see games as a new content category for us, similar to our expansion into original movies, animation, and unscripted television shows. Games, like movies and series, will be included at no additional cost in members' Netflix subscriptions." Initially, we will focus primarily on games for mobile devices.

"We are as excited as ever about our movie and TV series offerings and look forward to a long runway of increased investment and growth across all existing content categories.

This is a much more cautious approach to making games than what we have seen so far from Amazon and Google, which have struggled to find success in video games despite having virtually unlimited resources at hand: Stadia is a dead end, Amazon has yet to release anything, although the New World MMO is in closed beta today and will go live on August 31. [But Netflix is not targeting the same audience: by concentrating on existing users first and allowing access to games through mobile devices, they are probably opening their doors to people who don't consider themselves gamers. It is a strategy that avoids the "core gamer" demographic that Amazon and Google seem to be pursuing, but I have no doubt that it will work.

While this approach may be relatively deliberate, there is an urgency behind it, driven by other services, including gaming platforms, that compete for a limited number of eyeballs in an increasingly crowded media landscape.

"In the race to entertain consumers around the world, we continue to compete for screen time with companies as broad as YouTube, Epic Games, and TikTok. But we're mostly competing with ourselves to improve our service as quickly as we can." If we can do that, we are confident that we can maintain our strong position and continue to grow steadily, as we have over the past two decades."

There is no indication yet as to when gaming distribution will begin: Netflix said only that it is still "in the early stages of further expansion into gaming."