Grand Theft Auto helped triple Netflix’s gaming engagement last year

Netflix said that user engagement with games on the service tripled in 2023. “[Despite] games still being small, and certainly not yet material relative to our film and series business, we’re pleased with this progress,” the company said in its earnings report on Tuesday. As an example, the company pointed to the addition of the Grand Theft Auto trilogy to the service last year, although it isn’t clear how much the trilogy, which only arrived on Netflix on December 14, helped drive engagement in the final two weeks of the year.

Netflix said that Grand Theft Auto has become its “most successful launch to date” in terms of installs and engagement. It didn’t say how many people had downloaded the trilogy since it was released on the platform, however. Some customers had signed up for Netflix just to play the Grand Theft Auto games, the company said.

That’s a big change from 2022, when and analysis from Apptopia and CNBC revealed that less than one percent of Netflix’s customers were playing games, which the company had made available to anyone with a Netflix subscription a year earlier. Despite the slow uptake, Netflix continued adding games to the platform. It’s growing gaming library includes popular titles like Hades, Dead Cells, Braid, Death’s Door and Katana Zero, as well as games such as Oxenfree II: Lost Signal, which it developed on its own after buying indie developer Night School. The platform also includes games based on its own popular original shows like Money Heist and The Dragon Prince.

Beyond gaming, Netflix said that it added 13.1 million subscribers in the last three months of 2023, the highest number of subscribers it has added since the explosive growth it experienced during the pandemic. The total number of Netflix subscribers around the world is now 260 million.