Today, after months of studying and writing about Netflix’s extremely anticipated, if weird, foray into gaming, I lastly stretched my fingers out like a cartoon character and sat down with my iPhone to see what all of the fuss is about—and to get a greater thought of what the preferred streaming platform on the planet sees its position within the gaming house as being.

As an iOS person, I needed to wait my flip; Android customers had been first in a position to obtain the brand new video games from the Google Play Store on Nov. 2, which was additionally the day a brand new ‘Games’ tab confirmed up throughout the Netflix app on their telephones. Those within the Apple ecosystem need to obtain the video games in a equally roundabout approach, however in our case, it’s as a result of Apple has strict insurance policies that require video games to be downloaded as standalone entities from the App Store.

Just in case you’re curious, the 5 new video games do appear eminently playable. Stranger Things: 1984 is a cutesy 8-bit RPG that does a great job of capturing the allure of the hit present itself (“Looks like I picked a bad day to quit smoking,” a tiny pixelated Jim Hopper laments once you faucet on his ashtray within the recreation’s first scene). Stranger Things 3: The Game, which was truly first launched in 2019 to blended evaluations, is there too; the opposite three video games usually are not pegged to something particularly Netflix-branded however are nonetheless enjoyable in the best way that getting a ball in a gap or enjoying playing cards might be enjoyable once you’re making an attempt to go the time on public transportation.

But the truth that the video games are nice isn’t essentially a shock. When Netflix acquired Night School Studio, the indie recreation developer that’s recognized for having a few cult classics below its belt, again in September, it was a great signal that the platform had its finger on the heartbeat of the gaming scene and wished to nail the type of narrative gaming it had got down to produce. In actuality, the extra compelling query has all the time been much less ‘Are these games good?’ and extra so, ‘What are they doing here in the first place?’

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While Netflix is still the undisputed king of streaming, it’s obvious that the platform has been having some anxieties about how to hold onto its crown—particularly as it watches relative newcomer Disney+ charge into its lane, threatening to supplant it by 2024. Netflix has market share to protect and shareholders to appease, after all; the company isn’t going down without a fight. But what has sprung forth from the platform in recent months has been nothing short of an unstemmed tide of efforts to set itself far afield of its streaming counterparts that, to put it bluntly, reek of desperation and are weird as hell.

In fact, Netflix’s strategies to shore up subscribers in 2021 seem like they could fit pretty comfortably into two buckets, both of which are what I’m sure executives imagine very cool young people want: Have Games and Be TikTok. Back in March, the platform unveiled “Fast Laughs,” the TikTok-like infinite scroll feed that serves as a spotlight reel of the platform’s comedy choices. Just at some point earlier than its video games debuted on iOS, Netflix additionally introduced that it was testing a “Kids Clips” characteristic that may ostensibly assist to show younger viewers to its huge library of youngsters’s content material.

Everyone loves video games, but no one is going to subscribe to a streaming service just so they can play Shooting Hoops, a game that is, for some reason, not actually about basketball, but about getting a tiny basketball with a gun on the end of it into a hoop. That’s putting aside the fact that you have to download the games separately; you can’t simply stream them directly within Netflix.

Everyone loves TikTok, but no one wants to use an endless scroll feature embedded within the Netflix mobile app to watch 15-second clips of funny moments from the platform’s shows. I feel like I can see the beads of sweat forming on Netflix’s brow, and it’s making me uncomfortable.

You know where Netflix should really be ramping up investments? Its international programming offerings, where the platform has seen promising successes this year both in its adoption of more Africa-centric and African-produced programming and with Squid Game, the South Korea-produced undisputed runaway hit. But honestly, what do I know—I’m not a CEO, I’m just an idiot addicted to Shooting Hoops.

Netflix’s new video games—Stranger Things: 1984, Stranger Things 3: The Game, Shooting Hoops, Card Blast, and Teeter Up—are actually accessible for present subscribers on Android and iOS.