In May, we echoed a series of reports that pointed to the new plans of Netflix, a platform that, according to that information, intends to boost interactive content in its catalog.
Who is Mike Verdu?
A new report indicates that the company behind the streaming service has hired Mike Verdu as vice president of game development. Previously, Verdu had held executive positions at Electronic Arts, Zynga, and most recently at Facebook’s dedicated Oculus division, as vice president of augmented reality and virtual reality projects.
News of this hire was broken by Bloomberg yesterday afternoon. Verdu has since declined to issue statements to the press.
Mike Verdu has accumulated experience in the software world since 1985, including defense intelligence projects, to a stint at Atari, in addition to the aforementioned companies.
Netflix intends to offer video games on its streaming platform in 2022, according to an anonymous source inside the company. These contents will not depend on any additional subscription and will be offered as another category within the catalog, such as comedy specials or documentaries.
Mike Verdu’s position is preceded by Netflix COO Greg Peters, who during the company’s last earnings report in April, commented, “We’re in the business of creating these incredible deep universes and compelling characters and people come to love those universes and want to dive deeper and get to know the characters and their backstories and all that stuff better. So we’re really trying to figure out what are all these different ways that we can increase those points of connection, we can deepen that fandom.”
On the same occasion, he highlighted under that aspect the potential of games as a content format that can spark more interactions, noting that in their plans they contemplated for the time being “moving forward, continuing to learn and discover as you go along.”
Although Netflix concentrates the not inconsiderable sum of 207 million subscribers around the world, the market in which this proposal is inserted has become increasingly competitive over the years. Everything points to the fact that this could be one of the resources that can contribute to a significant differentiation from its competitors and to the eventual attraction of new audiences,
