Netflix closes its AAA Team Blue studio
Netflix has closed down its Southern California game studio, known as Team Blue, with the streaming giant seemingly reassessing the most ambitious part of its gaming strategy, if not the wider plan.
Per Game File, Team Blue was reportedly charged with making AAA games, and Netflix had made some significant hires to that end, with former Overwatch producer Chacko Sonny, Halo co-creator Joseph Staten, and Sony Santa Monica’s art director Rafael Grassetti, having all been lured to the promise of whatever Netflix had planned.
The closure will naturally affect all of the staff at Team Blue and lead to the cancellation of projects, though these were reportedly still only in the early stages of development – the aforementioned trio joined in late 2022 and early 2023.
They still have their Helsinki-based studio, Texas-based mobile developer Boss Fight Entertainment, as well as Oxenfree develoer Night School Studio and Cozy Grove devs Spry Fox. It was reported this summer that they had more than 80 games in development with both owned studios and external partners.
Team Blue was a bit of an outlier to Netflix’s broader strategy of creating tie ins to their TV series and filling out a library of smaller, predominantly mobile games to fill out a library of distractions for their main TV subscription. Yes, that has included things like Stranger Things, Emily in Paris, Queens Gambit and other tie-ins, but there’s also the GTA remaster trilogy, World of Goo and plenty others.
Source: Game File
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