(LR) Netflix co-directors Reed Hastings and Ted Sarandos arrive at the Allen & Company Sun Valley conference on July 6, 2021 in Sun Valley, Idaho.
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Netflix has hired Facebook video game executive Mike Verdu, where he was vice president of augmented reality and virtual reality content, as the company makes a deeper push into gaming.
Prior to his two years on Facebook, Verdu worked for the gaming companies Electronic Arts, Kabam, Zynga and Atari, which date back to the late 1990s. A Netflix spokesman confirmed the rent, which Bloomberg was the first to report.
Shares of Netflix rose 2% in extended trading on Wednesday.
The move reflects Netflix’s ambition to go beyond offering TV shows and movies to its more than 200 million subscribers. Like the streaming business, online games are becoming more competitive as Amazon, Google and Microsoft invest in the category.
Netflix has recently made its way to the market two years ago. The company told the E3 video game conference in 2019 that it would launch a mobile game based on the “Stranger Things” series, following the announced release of “Stranger Things 3: The Game” for consoles and PCs. say he was creating Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics as an adaptation of the Netflix movie “The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance.”
In its 2019 shareholder letter, Netflix pointed to the game Fortnite as competition. The report reported in May that Netflix was looking for an executive to drive the games.
– CNBC’s Alex Sherman and Ari Levy contributed to this report.
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