Former Netflix games boss Mike Verdu has now left the company, reports Game File.
Verdu was the streaming giant’s first games boss, moving into the role in August 2021. Verdu was previously VP for AR/VR content at Meta, SVP of EA Mobile, studio president and chief creative officer at Kabam and more.
In June 2024, Verdu moved aside to set up what was then termed a new “games innovation” team at Netflix. The following month, former first party development boss at Epic Games Alain Tascan took over as Netflix games president. And in November, Verdu announced he was Netflix’s new VP of ‘genAI for games’.
At the time, Verdu took a swipe at some of the reporting of his moves within Netflix. “Pay no mind to the uninformed speculation in the media about the changes in Netflix Games,” he added. “What you’ve seen over the last several months was actually a planned transition.”
His departure alongside that of former third party games boss Leanne Loombe to Annapurna means there’s been a swift turnaround at the top of Netflix’s games arm in recent months, on top of the closure of its triple-A games studio and the cancellation of several double-A and indie projects once slated to arrive on the service.
Verdu effectively built the first iteration of the Netflix games team, which we covered back in March 2022.
We broke the news that Netflix was hiring a triple-A game team back in November 2022, and by July 2023 Netflix had hired several big-name console game-makers, including former Overwatch lead Chacko Sonny, creative leader on the Halo and Destiny franchises Joseph Staten and God of War: Ragnarok’s art director Rafael Grassetti.
In October 2024, the triple-A game team was disbanded as Netflix’s focus shifted to releasing more family-friendly and known-IP game projects, as confirmed in January’s earnings call.
That later led to the removal of several double-A and indie game projects from its release slate. One can now expect more titles like Squid Game: Unleashed in the future, games which lean on popular Netflix IP and are designed to keep people playing in between seasons or episodes of their favourite shows.
