Netflix told shareholders last night that Rockstar’s trio of GTA games have been the firm’s most successful game launches to date. But how successful, exactly?
Appmagic data suggests that the three remastered Grand Theft Auto games have been downloaded just over 18m times to date across iOS and Android. They were launched through Netflix on December 14 2023.
GTA: San Andreas is the most popular title by far, says Appmagic, with 11.6m downloads combined. The iOS edition of San Andreas has generated around 9.1m downloads to date, with the Android version on around 2.6m.
Vice City has a combined 4.1m downloads to date, with 3.1m on iOS and around 900k on Android. GTA III completes the trilogy with around 2.4m installs – ~1.7m on iOS and ~700k on Android.
The above graph shows the scale of that GTA-inspired spike. It shows all Netflix game downloads combined per month since the first batch of titles arrived in August 2021, and is based on Appmagic data.
The top titles on the service from launch until the end of May 2022 were Asphalt Xtreme, Stranger Things: 1984 and Bowling Ballers, with Exploding Kittens joining the top performers near the end of the month.
Netflix game downloads got a bump in late 2022 with the arrival Too Hot To Handle: Love is a Game in December 2022, with interactive narrative Twelve Minutes and Hello Kitty Happiness Parade also making their way into the top Netflix downloads at the end of 2022.
Very few new games made an impact for most of 2023 until late September with the arrival of narrative puzzler Storyteller and later Football Manager 2024 Mobile in November. December, of course, saw a monster download spike driven by the GTA remasters.
The top ten downloads on the service to date are as follows, again according to Appmagic:
Netflix’s said in a letter to shareholders yesterday that while it is “early days” for its games offering, “engagement tripled last year”.
It also described games as a small part of its business “and certainly not yet material” relative to TV and film, but it is pleased with its progress in games.
The launch of Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto trilogy was Netflix’s “most successful launch to date in terms of installs and engagement,” it added, and said that some consumers signed up to Netflix “simply to play these games.”
