After changing its gaming strategy to focus more on games played on TV, Netflix announced that it is acquiring Ready Player Me, an avatar creation platform based in Estonia. The streamer said Friday that it plans to use the startup’s development tools and infrastructure to create avatars that will allow Netflix subscribers to transport their faces and fans into different games.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Ready Player Me had raised $72 million in venture backing from investors, including a16z, Endeavor, Konvoy Ventures, Plural, and several angels, including co-founders of companies like Roblox, Twitch, and King Games.
Netflix told TechCrunch that the startup’s team of about 20 people will join the company. Of the four founders Rainer Selvet, Haver Järveoja, Kaspar Tiri and Timmu Tõke, only CTO Rainer Selvet is moving to Netflix. He has no estimate on how long it will take until the avatars are released. Nor does it specify which games or types of games will get avatars first.
After the acquisition, Ready Player Me will end its services on January 31, 2026, including the online avatar creator, PlayerZero.
“Our vision has always been to enable avatars and identities to travel across multiple games and virtual worlds,” Ready Player Me CEO Timmu Tõke said in a statement. “We’ve been on an independent path to make this vision a reality for a long time. Now I’m very excited for the Ready Player Me team to join Netflix to scale our technology and expertise to a global audience and contribute to Netflix’s exciting vision for gaming.”
Netflix’s game changer
The Netflix deal represents the company’s changing approach to gaming.
When it moved into the market four years ago, the company offered mobile games to its subscribers, who would log in using their Netflix accounts. At the time, Netflix explained that it saw gaming as another new category, similar to its other expansions into original films, animation and unscripted television.
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Netflix has acquired several gaming studios and titles and licensed others, led by Mike Verdu, the company’s vice president of games who previously worked at EA and Kabam. This strategy had mixed results. While some of its bigger, better-known titles may have attracted some customers, such as GTA: San Andreas, others were virtually unknown. (The company recently said the GTA game was in progressalso, along with dozens of other titles.)
Netflix also close below many of his studio acquisitions or returned them to their founders.
To some extent, these changes could have been expected. Going into this, Netflix knew it was moving forward the game would be an experimentand he would have to adapt as he discovered what worked and what didn’t.
As part of its shift in strategy, Netflix last year introduced a new executive, Alain Tascan, formerly of Epic Games, as its president of games. Verdu, who was then vice president of genetic artificial intelligence for games, he left seven months later.
Under Tascan, Netflix expanded its games-for-TV lineup and began focusing on party games, children’s games, narrative games, and more mainstream titles.
The streamer was recently launched a board of party games for TVs and mobiles, including Netflix Puzzled, PAW Patrol Academy, co WWE 2K25Red Dead Redemption, and Best Guess, a lively party game hosted by Hunter March and Howie Mandel, and a $1 million jackpot. This week, too announced a new FIFA title would hit televisions in time for the 2026 World Cup.
At last October’s TechCrunch Disrupt event, Netflix CTO Elizabeth Stone said the company was introducing real-time interactive voting for live content, which it was already testing with a live cooking show and soon to reboot talent show “Star Search.”
In doing so, Netflix is ​​now more closely following how the television industry has embraced mobile, interactive experiences, allowing audiences to vote for contestants on “American Idol” or favorite couples on reality shows like “Love Island.”
Whether Netflix can get its audience to think of its brand — traditionally associated with passive, thin viewing — as something to turn to for interactive activities like gaming remains to be seen.
Correction: Netflix originally told TechCrunch that all founders would participate. It’s just CTO Rainer Selvet participating, Netflix corrected. The article has been updated.
