From Apple to Netflix: Why Big Tech is pushing deeper into gaming ecosystem

Samsung, Apple, Meta and Netflix are pushing deeper into gaming, using games to strengthen hardware, subscriptions and ecosystems as the industry expands beyond consoles

When Samsung arrives at Gamescom 2026, it will have more than a gaming monitor to talk about. The company is taking what it describes as a "full-stack gaming lineup" to the event, covering smartphones, monitors, TVs, PCs, storage and gaming services. Samsung has already expanded Gaming Hub beyond televisions and monitors to Galaxy smartphones. The showcase is another sign of how broadly the company now sees gaming fitting into its consumer electronics business.

 

Samsung's move is part of a larger shift across the technology industry. Apple has been building gaming into the iPhone, iPad and Mac; Meta has been using games to strengthen its Quest VR platform; and Netflix has spent several years trying to turn its streaming service into a games destination.

 

 

The companies are approaching the market from different directions, but gaming offers each of them something valuable: a way to make existing hardware and services more useful, and to keep consumers spending more time within their ecosystems. 

From a smartphone feature to a hardware strategy

Apple offers the clearest example of how gaming has moved up the priority list.

 

The company spent years improving the graphics capabilities of its chips, but console-style games on the iPhone gave those improvements a visible purpose. With the A17 Pro, Apple introduced hardware-accelerated ray tracing to the iPhone 15 Pro and began bringing games such as Resident Evil Village, Resident Evil 4, Death Stranding and Assassin's Creed Mirage to its devices.

 

Gaming has since appeared more often in Apple's hardware presentations, particularly when the company has something to show about its silicon.

 

The software side has expanded too. With iOS 26, iPadOS 26 and macOS 26, Apple introduced a dedicated Games app that brings games, recommendations, friends, achievements and events into one place. Apple Arcade has continued to add titles, including established franchises such as Civilization and Madden NFL 27.

 

Together, these moves give Apple's chips another workload to showcase and tie its products more closely together. A game can begin on an iPhone, continue on an iPad or Mac, and stay linked to the same account and ecosystem, a useful proposition for a company that does not sell a console.

 

Samsung is approaching the same opportunity from a broader hardware portfolio. A gaming push can sell a phone with a faster processor, a television with lower latency, a high-refresh-rate monitor, a PC with better graphics performance or an SSD built for demanding games. Gaming gives Samsung a common use case running across several categories of hardware. It has also been pushing cloud gaming through Gaming Hub, letting compatible TVs and monitors access games without a console.

The audience is already there

The most obvious reason Big Tech is interested in gaming is scale.

 

As per market tracker Sensor Tower's State of Gaming 2026 report, games were downloaded 52 billion times across mobile, PC and console platforms in 2025, around 50 billion of them on mobile.

 

Google Play accounted for about 81 per cent of game downloads, the App Store 15 per cent, and PC and console together just 4 per cent.

 

Mobile is where the audience is. Almost every smartphone is potentially a gaming device. PC and console tell a different story: only about 2 billion downloads in 2025, but deeper engagement and stronger monetisation per player. Steam alone generated $11.7 billion in revenue in 2025, up from $10.5 billion in 2024 and $8.9 billion in 2023, per Sensor Tower.

This creates an interesting opportunity for companies that already control several parts of the technology stack. A smartphone maker can provide the screen and processor, a TV maker the display, a cloud provider the computing power, a subscription company the games, a chipmaker the graphics hardware. Gaming becomes a thread connecting products that might otherwise have little to do with one another.

Meta needs games to make VR work

Meta's gaming strategy is different, but arguably more dependent on games. For the Quest headset, gaming is not just another application. It is one of the clearest reasons to buy the hardware.

 

Meta's June 2026 VR Games Showcase featured a long list of upcoming Quest titles, including PAYDAY: Aces High, Transformers: Beyond Reality Redux and several multiplayer and cooperative games.

 

Meta is also folding the headset into a broader gaming ecosystem rather than keeping it limited to games built specifically for VR. In July, Xbox and Meta announced that eligible Horizon+ subscribers would get a starter edition of Xbox Game Pass, with access to more than 50 games and 10 hours of cloud gaming a month. Meta's August update said those games could stream directly to a Quest headset.

 

That matters strategically. VR has always faced a chicken-and-egg problem: consumers need a reason to buy the headset, developers need a large enough audience to justify building expensive VR-only games. Bringing existing gaming ecosystems into the headset sidesteps that. The Quest need not depend entirely on new VR experiences; it can also become another screen for games people already know.

Netflix is trying something similar

Netflix is perhaps the clearest example of a company entering gaming from outside the traditional industry.

 

It started with mobile games but has increasingly moved toward titles playable on television. In June, Netflix launched FIFA World Cup: Launch Edition, using a phone as controller while the TV serves as the display. The company has also experimented with cloud-based TV games.

 

The logic is familiar. Netflix already has the household, the screen and the subscription. Games are another form of entertainment that fits inside that relationship.

 

But Netflix also shows why the opportunity is not as straightforward as it looks. Reuters, citing the Wall Street Journal, reported in 2025 that Netflix had invested around $1 billion in gaming, while an Omdia analysis found games had increased user time by less than 0.5 per cent over more than four years. Having millions of subscribers, it turns out, does not automatically make a company a gaming company. But the zest continues, and Netflix will stream premiere an extended first look of Rockstar Games’ much anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6 extended trailer on August 27, giving its subscribers a six hour head start on the trailer before it goes up on YouTube and Rockstar's own channels.

The real prize is the ecosystem

Gaming has a useful quality for companies selling devices and services: a successful game keeps a user coming back long after the initial download.

 

Per Sensor Tower's report, mobile game downloads declined in 2025, but revenue still rose 1 per cent to $82 billion, with the market shifting toward retaining and engaging existing players. Mid-core games maintained the strongest retention across the 1, 7, 30 and 365-day windows measured, while casual and hypercasual games saw steady deterioration in retention.

 

That makes games useful to companies with several products to sell. For Samsung, a game can sell a phone with a faster processor, a high-refresh-rate monitor, a low-latency TV or a faster SSD. For Apple, gaming demonstrates chip capability while strengthening the link between iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV and Apple Arcade. For Meta, games give people a reason to put on a Quest headset regularly. For Netflix, they offer another way to use a subscription beyond films and television.

Gaming is also becoming easier to distribute

Cloud gaming changes the equation further. The traditional model needs a powerful device, a game download and often a dedicated platform. Cloud gaming shifts most of the computing to remote servers, letting the game run elsewhere while the player interacts with it through a connected device.

 

Microsoft has built around this through Xbox Cloud Gaming, now available across supported PCs, smartphones, tablets, select Samsung and LG smart TVs, and Meta Quest headsets.

 

Nvidia has taken a similar approach with GeForce NOW, using its data centre GPUs to stream PC games to Macs, TVs, smartphones, tablets and handhelds. GeForce NOW connects to existing libraries on Steam, Epic Games Store, GOG, PC Game Pass and Ubisoft Connect, so users can stream games they already own rather than build a separate library for the cloud service.

 

The scale shows how far cloud gaming has moved. Nvidia said in March 2026 that GeForce NOW users had streamed more than 1 billion hours of gameplay across more than 4,500 games since launch. The company has also expanded support to VR devices, including Meta Quest and Apple Vision Pro.

But Big Tech has not suddenly discovered games

It is tempting to call this a new gaming boom among technology companies. That misses the larger shift.

 

Gaming has mattered to Microsoft, Sony, Nvidia, AMD and PC manufacturers for years. What has changed is that gaming is increasingly useful to companies that already own another part of the consumer technology stack. The industry is also more attractive because mobile has solved the reach problem while PC and console keep demonstrating the value of highly engaged players. For Big Tech, that combination is hard to ignore.