Netflix has long seen the strategic potential of gaming, but it’s struggled on execution. After intially fruitless dabbling in triple-A, the focus under gaming leader Alain Tascan has been on broader appeal. This week has seen the announcement of an exclusive FIFA partnership and the acquisition of avatar creation platform Ready Player Me; both follow a year of steady development of its offering for kids, with age-appropriate mobile games now suggested in the platform’s kid-friendly view. During my recent work analysing the company’s strategy, I spoke to Lisa Burgess, GM Netflix Games (Kids) about how the streamer is thinking about play, discovery, and what comes next.
Netflix has been building in games for several years now. From your perspective, what role do kids games play inside the broader Netflix ecosystem today?
Lisa Burgess: The simplest way I can describe it is the company’s mission is to entertain the world. We do a great job with film and TV shows, and live is another way we entertain. But a huge part of entertainment is games, especially for younger audiences on mobile.
From the types of gaming you’re offering, it’s clear that Netflix isn’t looking to compete with console games or AAA revenue drivers, so you’re trying to own a piece of the gaming audience but not the gaming industry as a whole. Would that be a fair way of putting it?
That’s true. Yep, I like that.
Netflix has talked about a refined strategy and four pillars. How do kids games fit into that?Kids is one of the four pillars. There are learnings that transfer across all pillars, and things that are specific to kids. What’s most specific is that when kids get into an IP, they will want to watch it and play it. That connection is tighter than it is for adults. With adults, just because you watch something doesn’t mean you want to play that style of game. With kids, it often does.
Games have recently started surfacing in kids profiles. What prompted that change?
It’s been a long time coming. When I took this role in January, there were a lot of things we needed to do to be able to offer kids games properly. Having kids games discoverable in kids profiles was one of them, but there were other foundations that were more urgent first.
What needed to be in place from a safety, UX, or parental control standpoint before making that move?
A lot of it came down to having the right parental gating inside our SDK. The SDK wasn’t necessarily built to offer kids games in the way we wanted. So it was more prioritisation than internal debate.
How do you balance parental control with discovery and ease of access for kids?
Parental controls aren’t new for us, we’ve had controls in kids profiles already. But it’s also part of the foundation work for games. We do consumer insights work with parents to understand expectations and make sure we show up strongly there. More to come.
How do you think about shared play, especially as Netflix expands beyond mobile into browser and TV-based gaming?
The party and family space is really interesting. The GM leading that pillar and I talk a lot because there’s overlap. Family experiences where people play together on the TV, owning that living-room moment, and being able to do something on your phone and have it show up on the big screen.
One thing that’s important is designing for the youngest age you think will be using it. If you are designing for someone who doesn’t read yet, you have to make sure there isn’t text. Even in internal playtests, parents often ask for more instructions, but kids can’t read. The game is designed for them. For family games you need that mental model, or you need modes that don’t leave the youngest audience behind.
What are you looking for when you consider IP to extend into kids games?
For kids, we wanted to focus on things that are highly recognisable, and that can fall into different categories. It can be big IP that is on our service. It can be toy or literary IP, ideally with a connection to the service. We want it to be easy to understand why we have the game. Especially in preschool, when kids get into an IP they want to watch it, play it, buy the toys, wear it. At that age it’s like their best friend.
You’ll see that in what we’re launching. It’s either based on big IP, or something like Toca Boca Hair Salon, which is very recognisable in the games space.
Is the current focus mainly preschool, or are you thinking about older kids too?
The area I focus on is eight and under. You’re right that much of what we’ve selected is skewing preschool. That’s been our foundation. As we go into 2026, we’re thinking more about how we develop great experiences for six to eight, and IP that aligns to that audience. It’s a harder audience. By six, some kids are already on Roblox and Minecraft, and the ecosystem gets more competitive, though not impossible.
How does Netflix define success for kids games? What signals matter most at this stage?
Fundamentally, we think about success as engagement, time spent playing games. We’re not thinking about it the way most people think about kids games, which is revenue. A lot of kids games are optimised around paywalls and getting paid subscribers, that first user experience. We’re thinking about engagement, which is transformative because developers can focus on making a fun game and a great game rather than the paywall part.
What is the timeline of success you are building toward?
It’s tricky. The way I describe it internally is it’s not about an end state, it’s about trajectory. Are we moving in the right direction?
We do look at external signals too. We don’t share data, but one thing I can share is that in the US App Store on iPad (after landing gaming into kids profiles), three of the top 10 free kids games were ours. That’s a massive achievement in terms of trajectory. A year ago we started kids games, and now we’re ending the year with that kind of visibility.
Some games are designed specifically for kids, while others are simply kid-appropriate. How are you thinking about that distinction as discovery expands?
Discoverability is a huge part of the journey. I think about two categories. There are kids games made and designed specifically for the audience they are serving, and that’s a massive part of my focus.
Then there are games that kids play. That’s a slightly different nuance. Something like Solitaire can be kid-appropriate from a maturity rating standpoint, but that doesn’t automatically mean it belongs in the kids profile. We have to do that work, similar to how we curate what belongs in kids profiles for TV. There are games that 12-and-under will enjoy that should be there, but we need to figure out our stance for games.
What are you most excited to build next?
We’ve been building foundations, including foundations of the portfolio. Other things we’re looking at are trends in what Gen Alpha will expect as consumers. One of those things is customization by default. Personalization becomes the expectation. How do we start building for the future of what the next generation is going to expect?
You can download a copy of the Netflix Kids Gaming report here.
