(L-R) Co-CEOs of Netflix Reed Hastings and Ted Sarandos arrive for the Allen & Company Sun Valley Convention on July 06, 2021 in Sun Valley, Idaho.
Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images
Netflix has employed video-game executive Mike Verdu from Facebook, where he was vice chairman of augmented reality and virtual reality bellow material, as the company makes a deeper push into gaming.
Earlier than his two years at Facebook, Verdu labored at gaming companies Electronic Arts, Kabam, Zynga and Atari, dating back to the late 1990s. A Netflix spokesperson confirmed the rent, which Bloomberg was first to relate.
Netflix shares rose 2% in prolonged trading on Wednesday.
The waddle reflects Netflix’s ambition to head past offering television reveals and motion photographs to its more than 200 million subscribers. Savor the streaming trade, on-line gaming is getting more aggressive, as Amazon, Google and Microsoft are all investing within the category.
Netflix has been slowly making its way into the market for about two years. The company said at the E3 gaming convention in 2019 that it was releasing a mobile game based on the “Stranger Things” collection, following an announced launch of Stranger Things 3: The Game for consoles and PCs. The company also said it was creating Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics as an adaptation of the Netflix movie “The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance.”
In its shareholder letter in 2019, Netflix pointed to the game Fortnite as competition. The Information reported in May that Netflix was wanting for an executive for a push into gaming.
— CNBC’s Alex Sherman and Ari Levy contributed to this relate.
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Netflix hires Facebook gaming executive Mike Verdu as part of a deeper push into entertainment
