• by Colin Kirkland , Yesterday

Netflix is moving beyond its multiplayer on-platform gaming strategy with the acquisition of Ready Player Me, a company that developed avatar-creation technology Netflix plans to bring to its gaming ecosystem.

As the popular streaming service continues to build out its gaming options, it plans to use Ready Player Me’s tools and infrastructure to invite its users to create individual digital personas and similar to traditional metaverse elements, utilize these avatars across different gaming titles.

Netflix has yet to announce how long its avatar product will take to create and roll out to paying subscribers, nor has it hinted at which of its gaming titles will be accessible with user avatars.  Prior to the acquisition, Ready Player Me raised $72 million in funding from leaders across the social gaming industry, including co-founders of Roblox, Twitch, and King Games.

According to a report from TechCrunch, Ready Player Me's 20 employees will join Netflix, as well as CTO Rainer Selvet. The startup plans on shuttering within the first month of 2026.

“Our vision has always been to enable avatars and identities to travel across many games and virtual worlds,” Ready Player Me CEO Timmu Tõke said in a statement. “We've been on an independent path to make that vision a reality for a long time.”

Tõke believes that Netflix's acquisition will help scale Ready Player Me's tech to a global audience.

Netflix’s launch of smart TV-accessible gaming came after reports surfaced in 2023 regarding the transition of its mobile gaming offerings to a bigger screen. The following year, Alain Tascan, former executive vice president of game development at Epic Games, became Netflix's president of games and set a goal of eventually making Netflix games playable on any device.

In October, the company began advertising its smart TV games as a social experience among friends and family, explaining in a blog post that paying subscribers can simply "scroll to the 'Games' tab on your TV, pick a game and use your phone as the controller to join."

The streaming giant's roster of available big-screen games embodies a group-centric experience, with “LEGO Party!” inviting friends to compete in minigames, and “Boggle Party” accessible to up to eight players.

Other games include "Pictionary: Game Night," "Tetris Time Warp" and "Party Crashers: Fool Your Friends," a "whodunit"-style game resemblant of "Clue."