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Streaming service Netflix have acquired Spry Fox, the developers of Alphabear and Cozy Grove. Spry Fox say that all their existing games will remain available on their current platforms and the studio are continuing to work on Cozy Grove 2 and “a larger, non-violent MMO.”
In their post announcing the acquisition, Spry Fox’s David Edery writes that the studio will “continue making the games that we were already making and wanted to make, but with more support and resources to make those games better and bring them to more people around the world.”
Edery also writes that Spry Fox can “stop stressing about how our games generate profit on our games and instead focus exclusively on making them as enjoyable and fulfilling to our players as possible.” Because Netflix is a charity that just loves joy, I guess.
Spry Fox is Netflix’s sixth in-house games studio, a collection that also includes the recently acquired Oxenfree developer Night School.
All Netflix’s currently published games, whether by wholly-owned studios or not, are available to play via the Netflix mobile app. The games are included as part of a Netflix subscription and feature no microtransactions or adverts. If you’re already a Netflix subscriber, it’s worth grabbing the app so you can have a go at Poinpy, the new game from Downwell developer Ojiro Fumoto.
Netflix sees video games as a threat because if people are playing games then they’re not watching television. It also sees them as a way of diverisfying their business in light of subscriber numbers (and the company’s share price) declining in 2022 after years of growth.
The acquisition of Spry Fox also forms part of a recent trend of games industry consolidation, which sometimes goes wrong, as in the case of Embracer’s recent acquisition and near-immediate closure of Hitman Go’s developers.