Netflix is jumping into gaming. Can it succeed where others have stumbled?

Netflix might be the reigning monarch of streaming but it is also under pressure.

In addition to the competition for the streaming dollar it faces from deep-pocketed rivals, notably Disney, it has been grappling with slowing growth in its home market where consumers have also shown some resistance to its attempts to force through price rises.

It is against this backdrop that the company is attempting to push into another highly competitive market: gaming. The hire of Mike Verdu, who joins as vice president of game development, reporting to chief operating officer Greg Peters, is a statement of intent. Verdu’s CV includes previous stints at EA Mobile, Facebook and Zynga, which is a good indication of the area Netflix is looking to target.

The group has also been sniffing around for developers and is expected to power up its service with its first new offerings within the next year or so. Without charging extra, at least at first. Which is where it gets interesting.

The streaming giant is doing everything it possibly can to keep its subscribers’ eyes glued to its content. It wants, it needs, to make itself the key part of their entertainment mix; the core streaming service, the one they are least likely to feel they can do without in a pinch.

To that end, it has also been seeking to spruce up its in-house content. The recent deal struck with Steven Spielberg’s Amblin is part of that. The company also made a splash with a major outlay of cash for the two Knives Out sequels planned by Rian Johnson and starring Daniel Craig, in an attempt to establish its first bona fide franchise. If even one of those is half as good as the original that will prove to be money well spent.

How the addition of games will work against this backdrop remains up in the air. Netflix hasn’t yet settled on a strategy.

However, whatever it decides upon, charging extra will clearly be a key part of the mix. The question will be how to go about it.

Will someone who subscribes to Netflix feel comfortable with paying a higher price for the service because it has some games in addition to the other stuff?

Another option would be to offer the games as an add-on, expanding the menu of subscription packages the company has on offer and generating extra revenue that way.

The challenge for Netflix is that games are even easier to get wrong than movies. They have multiple moving parts that all have to work together. They require diverse groups of creators and tech-heads to develop them. They demand a far more active relationship with audiences than movies do. And they have been responsible for a number of high-profile duds.

Even Amazon, which has dumped hundreds of millions of dollars into its gaming studio with little enough to show for it, and owns Twitch, the favoured medium of gamers to stream their play, has struggled to find a hit.

The company must be hoping the much delayed New World, due to debut at the end of next month, changes that so it’s no longer the subject of detailed journalistic meditations on how a company that seems to have the Midas touch with whatever sector it chooses to enter has been unable to get this one right.

Amazon is hardly the only company to have crashed and burned, or simply to have failed to live up to expectations, with its forays into the industry. The roadside is littered with more than its fair share of car wrecks, and the crashes have sometimes been fun to watch, in a horror movie kind of way.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is a sharp cookie so presumably he’ll have inspected some of them, and maybe read one or two of the Amazon exposes. His shareholders had best hope he has. These are choppy, if entertaining, waters.