Spirit Crossing is the next life sim from the Netflix-owned studio Spry Fox, makers of the beloved Animal Crossing-like Cozy Grove. Netflix announced the ambitious social MMO this week alongside some other games and a renewed commitment to investing in gaming for years to come. Spirit Crossing will be a big test of just how serious it still is about that.
A trailer revealing the game shows characters fishing, dancing, and gliding around a Studio Ghibli-esque world. Alongside Animal Crossing, there are clear influences from other Nintendo games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, with the cute rituals and interactions of Cozy Grove blown out into a more full-fledged online social sim. There will be building, exploration, and more. It could end up being a great game, but will it be great on mobile?
Netflix purchased Spry Fox in 2022, a year after Cozy Grove blew up during the pandemic, thanks in part to it being a great Animal Crossing-inspired cozy game that wasn’t exclusive to the Switch. Last year, the studio released Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit exclusively on mobile, an uneven sequel that drew lots of complaints for its smaller form factor and Netflix exclusivity.
Using the touch screen to maneuver around, do odd jobs, and interact with the game’s eclectic anthropomorphized cast turned out to be surprisingly cumbersome. “The touch controls are the worst but thankfully phone controllers are super compatible and work like a charm!” one player wrote on Reddit, echoing a common refrain among the series’ veteran fans.
Netflix’s confusing gaming strategy was recently punctuated by the closure of its AAA studio and numerous departures, including that of former head of development Mike Verdu. His replacement, former Epic Games exec Alain Tascan, told Bloomberg at GDC this week that Netflix is focused on mobile and TV and wants to cut down on the amount of potential friction for new players, like needing to own a console.
The company also expects its first Smart TV games to launch later this year, he told The Verge. No microtransactions or in-game ads, but also fewer indie games. It’s part of a five-year plan for Netflix to find its own Roblox- or Fortnite-style killer app for games. This is apparently supposed to be a more focused approach than the company has employed in the last few years, though the genres Netflix is doubling down on—party games, kids games, narrative games, and “mainstream” games—suggest this is more of a “we’ll know it when we see it” type of thing.
I’m skeptical that anything will be different this time around, if only because it still seems like the mandate to make great games is hemmed in by Netflix’s existing business model. The subscription service is essentially a bundle, but it’s trying to grow games like it’s a platform. You can understand why Netflix would be keen to get games running natively on smart TVs, or streamed to them, where it doesn’t have to pay Apple a 30 percent App Store fee.
But smartphones as controllers can be extremely limiting. Surely Netflix will have to start making its own gaming controller at some point, right? And at that point you’re half way to being a game console anyway. What’s the point of keeping your games off of PlayStation 5 and Switch 2 when other companies (Microsoft) are rushing to go multiplatform? The most popular games—Fortnite, Roblox, Genshin Impact—are on (almost) everything. This is why I’m so curious to see Spirit Crossing in action. Maybe Netflix is finally onto something, or maybe it’s still trying to pound a square peg into a round hole.
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