Netflix acquires gaming avatar maker Ready Player Me

After shifting its gaming strategy 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 use the startup’s development tools and infrastructure to build avatars that will allow Netflix subscribers to carry their personas and fandom across 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 various angels, including the co-founders of companies like Roblox, Twitch, and King Games.

Netflix told TechCrunch the startup’s team of around 20 people will be joining the company, including the founders Rainer Selvet, Haver Jarveoja, Kaspar Tiri, and Timmu Toke. It doesn’t have an estimate of how long it will be until avatars launch. Nor does it detail which games or types of games will be first to get avatars.

Following the acquisition, Ready Player Me will be winding down its services on January 31, 2026, including its online avatar creation tool, PlayerZero.

“Our vision has always been to enable avatars and identities to travel across many games and virtual worlds,” Ready Player Me CEO Timmu Toke said in a statement. “We’ve been on an independent path to make that vision a reality for a long time. I’m now very excited for the Ready Player Me team to join Netflix to scale our tech and expertise to a global audience and contribute to the exciting vision Netflix has for gaming.”

Netflix’s gaming shift

Netflix’s deal represents the company’s changing approach to games.

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 TV.

Netflix acquired numerous gaming studios and titles, and licensed others, under the leadership of Mike Verdu, the company’s VP of games who formerly worked at EA and Kabam. That strategy saw mixed results. While some of its larger, more well-known titles may have attracted some customers, like GTA: San Andreas, others were virtually unknown. (The company 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 could have been anticipated. Going into this, Netflix knew that moving into gaming would be an experiment, and it would have to adapt as it discovered what worked and what didn’t.

As part of its strategy shift, Netflix last year brought in a 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 focusing on 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 WWE2K25, 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 new FIFA title would 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 company 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 way, 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 or not Netflix can convince its audience to think of its brand — traditionally associated with passive, lean-back viewing — as something to turn to for interactive activities like gaming, still remains to be seen.