Netflix Playground Offers a Safe Space for Tiny Gamers

Netflix is continuing its push into gaming with Netflix Playground, a new app designed to provide a curated library of family-friendly games targeted specifically at children ages eight and under.

While Netflix’s gaming service has added quite a few kids’ games since its late 2021 launch, the new app is a way of both highlighting the existence of these games for families as well as ensuring that kids can be left to enjoy them in a safe space.

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Like all Netflix games, the content in Netflix Playground is included as part of a Netflix subscription, with no ads on in-app purchases. It’s effectively Netflix’s answer to Apple Arcade, although the content also tends to tie in more directly with Netflix’s streaming content.

For example, you’ll find titles like Peppa Pig and Sesame Street, both of which match shows on Netflix, and that’s an intentional co-branding. “We’re creating a seamless destination for discovery, learning, and play,” John Derderian, Netflix’s VP of Animation Series + Kids & Family TV, said in a statement to The Verge.

Netflix Playground is launching with seven mini-games:

1. Bad Dinosaurs: Prehistoric puzzles, sticker scenes, music, and memory games abound with Janet and her brood of tiny thunderlizards.
2. Dr. Seuss’s Horton: Fun and games that encourage creativity through interactive cause-and-effect play.
3. Dr. Seuss’s Red Fish, Blue Fish: Dive into musical play zones filled with rhythmic fun and gentle surprises.
4. Dr. Seuss’s The Sneetches: Kids will join Stella Sneetch on an imaginative adventure through Starbelly and Moonbelly Villages via creative play activities like the Shape Printer and Vehicle Builder, which encourage imaginative design and pattern recognition.
5. Peppa Pig: Play, count, care for guinea pigs, decorate cakes, and a whole lot more with Peppa and the rest of her Peppatown crew.
6. Sesame Street: It’s always a sunny day on Sesame Street, and the activities here encourage pattern recognition, object recognition, and free-form play.
7. StoryBots: These inquisitive creatures are here to help your kids hone their memory, improve pattern recognition, develop budding musical skills, and more.
8. Let’s Color: This isn’t a game, per se, but rather a creative hub where kids can unleash their inner artist with digital coloring pages and stickers featuring all their favorite characters from the Playground library.
   

However, the streaming giant also promises there are more to come, including Gabby’s Dollhouse, KPop Demon Hunters, PJ Masks, My Little Pony, and PAW Patrol.

Games can be downloaded inside the Netflix Playground app for offline play, so they’ll be available to keep kids entertained on long flights. The app also lets you easily free up space by removing games your kids aren’t playing anymore.

Netflix Playground is launching today in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, the Philippines and New Zealand, and will come to the rest of the world on April 28. It’s included in all Netflix membership plans, so your kids will be able to enjoy it even if you’re on the cheapest ad-supported plan. That still costs $8.99 following last month’s price hikes, but at least it’s better than the $19.99 and $26.99 Standard and Premium plans.

While Netflix is clearly trying to compete with Apple Arcade here, it’s fair to say Apple has a solid head start — and it isn’t slowing down. Netflix’s gaming initiatives are best for folks who are already paying for Netflix anyway, as you can get Apple Arcade on its own for only $6.99 a month, and it’s included in Apple One bundles that will give you Apple TV, Apple Music, and 50 GB of iCloud storage for four cents less than a Netflix Standard subscription.