The most visible instance of this new strategy debuted in June, when Netflix partnered with FIFA to release FIFA World Cup: Launch Edition, a cloud-based version of its digital soccer game.
The goal of the tie-up was to reach a mainstream audience that might never have considered themselves gamers before, according to Christian Volk, the director of gaming and esports partnerships at FIFA.
“Our Netflix experience is intentionally built around accessibility, immediacy and convenience,” Volk said. “If someone wants maximum realism, competitive precision and hundreds of hours of progression, dedicated console experiences remain the benchmark.”
The timing is not incidental. Netflix has spent much of 2026 pushing back against a narrative that its engagement is softening, attributing any dip to industry-wide, mature-market saturation rather than a problem unique to its platform.
A recent analysis of a number of its top shows, such as One Piece, Beef, The Night Agent and Avatar: The Last Airbender, revealed audience declines of 30% to 70% in their second seasons and further declines in their third, according to The Guardian. In July, Netflix said it would scale back the viewership data it releases to once a year. Over the last twelve months, its share price has dropped 40%, from $133 in June 2025 to $70 in July 2026.
Whether or not the streamer has an engagement problem, the pressure for it to find new reasons for subscribers to open the app every day has rarely been higher. And few forms of entertainment build daily habits as reliably as games.
“The ultimate example of this is Wordle,” said Alexander Lee, a journalist at the trade magazine GamesBeat. “All these media companies are trying to take advantage of the daily game habit. They’re showing up on platforms where people are already logging in and saying, ‘Hey, here’s a game that you can play every day.’”
Samsung offers a preview of what it looks like when that behavior forms.
Its Gaming Hub, running since 2022, saw unique active users grow more than 90% year-over-year in North America and over 200% globally between June 2025 and June 2026, according to GamesBeat. The growth is proof that the premise underpinning these streamers’ efforts, that audiences will show up for free, low-friction games on their televisions, is not hypothetical.
Still, none of this guarantees that this current wave will succeed where former efforts failed.
Using a phone as a controller is not new; Jackbox popularized it years ago. The harder problem was always whether cloud infrastructure could deliver a fast, high-fidelity experience cheaply enough to give away for free. That is the piece that Phynd claims to have solved.
What has grown more defined, however, is the shape of the opportunity streamers are chasing. Dedicated gamers were never going to abandon their consoles and premium set-ups to play Tetris on Netflix. Instead, the bet looks more like the mobile gaming boom of a decade ago, a wager that removing every point of friction—cost, hardware, even the controller itself—can introduce gaming to people who never before thought of themselves as players.
