Netflix has acquired games avatar company Ready Player Me for an undisclosed sum.
TechCrunch reports that the Estonian startup’s staff would be moving to the streaming giant, while their company would be wound up on January 31, 2026.
Only one of Ready Player Me’s founders would be joining Netflix, chief technology officer Rainer Selvet. There’s also no word as to when the company’s avatar offerings would be rolled out to the streaming giant’s audience. Ready Player Me will allow Netflix’s audience to build avatars that can be carried across different games on its platform.
Ready Player Me was founded in 2013 by Selvet, Haver Järveoja, Kaspar Tiri, and Timmu Tõke. To date, the company has attracted $72 million in investment, including funding from a16z.
In a post on LinkedIn, Ready Player Me’s CEO, Timmu Tõke, said that his company would be joining the streaming giant to “contribute to their gaming strategy”.
“Our team will be joining Netflix to contribute to their gaming strategy with our cross-game avatar tech, enabling players to carry their identities and fandom across games,” Tõke wrote.
“We started the company 12 years ago with Rainer, Kaspar and Haver. We were 20-year-olds from small towns in Estonia. We knew nothing about tech or startups, but were obsessed with avatars. Over the last 12 years, we have built many different products around avatars, from hardware scanners to personal avatar tech and eventually launching Ready Player Me more than 5 years ago.
“I’m very proud of the work with did with Ready Player Me, pushing cross-game interoperability further than anyone else before and serving thousands of developers.”
Netflix has been developing its games offering for several years now. To start with, the company acquired studios and set up AAA developers, though when Alain Tascan took over from Mike Verdu, the firm changed course and has wound back new game creation.
The streaming giant recently sold Spry Fox back to the studio’s founders.
At the start of December, Netflix announced that it intended to buy Warner Bros for $82.7 billion; rival Paramount Skydance has also initiated a hostile takeover deal, valuing the company at $108.4 billion for all of Warner Bros Discovery.
Discussing the deal, Netflix described Warner Bros’ games division as “relatively minor in the grand scheme of things”.
