After shifting its gaming technique to focus more on games played on the TV, Netflix announced it’s acquiring Ready Player Me, an avatar-creation platform based in Estonia. The streamer said Friday it plans to make use of the startup’s development tools and infrastructure to construct avatars that can allow Netflix subscribers to hold their personas and fandom across different games.
Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Ready Player Me had raised $72 million in enterprise backing from investors, including a16z, Endeavor, Konvoy Ventures, Plural, and various angels, including the co-founders of firms like Roblox, Twitch, and King Games.
Netflix told TechCrunch the startup’s team of around 20 people will likely be joining the corporate. Of the 4 founders Rainer Selvet, Haver Järveoja, Kaspar Tiri, and Timmu Tõke, only CTO Rainer Selvet is moving to Netflix. It doesn’t have an estimate of how long it should be until avatars launch. Nor does it detail which games or forms of games will likely be first to get avatars.
Following the acquisition, Ready Player Me will likely be winding down its services on January 31, 2026, including its online avatar creation tool, PlayerZero.
“Our vision has all the time been to enable avatars and identities to travel across many games and virtual worlds,” Ready Player Me CEO Timmu Tõke said in a press release. “We’ve been on an independent path to make that vision a reality for a very long time. I’m now very excited for the Ready Player Me team to affix Netflix to scale our tech and expertise to a world audience and contribute to the exciting vision Netflix has for gaming.”
Netflix’s gaming shift
Netflix’s deal represents the corporate’s changing approach to games.
When it moved into the market 4 years ago, the corporate offered mobile games to its subscribers, who would log in using their Netflix accounts. On the time, Netflix explained that it saw gaming as one other latest category, much like its other expansions into original movies, animation, and unscripted TV.
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Netflix acquired quite a few gaming studios and titles, and licensed others, under the leadership of Mike Verdu, the corporate’s VP of games who formerly worked at EA and Kabam. That strategy saw mixed results. While a few of its larger, more well-known titles can have attracted some customers, like GTA: San Andreas, others were virtually unknown. (The corporate recently said the GTA game was on its way out, too, alongside dozens of other titles.)
Netflix also shut down many of its studio acquisitions or returned them to their founders.
To some extent, these changes might have been anticipated. Going into this, Netflix knew that moving into gaming could be an experiment, and it could should adapt because it discovered what worked and what didn’t.
As a part of its strategy shift, Netflix last 12 months brought in a brand new executive, Alain Tascan, formerly of Epic Games, as its president of games. Verdu, who was then VP of generative AI for games, left seven months later.
Under Tascan, Netflix has expanded its gaming lineup for TV and begun specializing in party games, kids’ games, narrative games, and more mainstream titles.
Recently, the streamer released a slate of party games for TVs and mobile, including Netflix Puzzled, PAW Patrol Academy, plus WWE 2K25, Red Dead Redemption, and Best Guess, a live party game with hosts Hunter March and Howie Mandel, and a $1 million jackpot. This week, it also announced a brand new FIFA title could be coming to TVs in time for the World Cup in 2026.
At TechCrunch Disrupt’s event this October, Netflix CTO Elizabeth Stone said the corporate was introducing interactive real-time voting for live content, which it was already testing with a live cooking show and would soon bring to its reboot of the talent show “Star Search.”
In this fashion, Netflix is now more closely following how the TV industry embraced mobile, interactive experiences by allowing audience voting for “American Idol” contestants or favorite couples on reality shows like “Love Island.”
Whether Netflix can persuade its audience to consider its brand — traditionally related to passive, lean-back viewing — as something to show to for interactive activities like gaming, still stays to be seen.
Correction: Netflix originally told TechCrunch all founders were joining. It’s just CTO Rainer Selvet who’s joining, Netflix corrected. The article has been updated.