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Netflix Pushes Pause on Gaming

Plus a handheld gaming operating system showdown

Jason Dean

30 Jun 2025 — 5 min read

Image via Netflix

Netflix’s gaming division appears to be in flux, as the company plans to remove a significant number of games. Find out which ones below. Also, which handheld gaming operating system performs the best? All this and more. Let’s go!

Netflix removing over 20 games

Netflix is planning to remove over 20 games from its streaming platform starting July 1, including Hades and all three Monument Valley games.

Over the past few years, Netflix purchased a few studios and released games on the mobile version of their app. However, their deprioritization of games started last October when they shut down Team Blue gaming studio.

The Verge asked some of the publishers affected if they planned to distribute the games to mobile devices themselves. Nigel Lowrie, a spokesperson for Devolver Digital says that they “are looking at bringing games that leave services like Poinpy, Katana Zero, and Death’s Door to mobile stores as premium titles.”

The news caught some developers by surprise. Andrejs Klavins, lead designer for the Golden Idol series said on their Discord that “this is all recent news for us and all the practical implications have yet to be worked out.”

Most games will leave the service July 14, with Hades departing July 1. Here are the games leaving the platform:

Battleship
Braid, Anniversary Edition
Carmen Sandiego
CoComelon: Play with JJ
Death’s Door
Diner Out: Merge Cafe
Dumb Ways to Die
Ghost Detective
Hades (Note: Only available on iOS devices)
Katana ZERO
LEGO Legacy: Heroes Unboxed
Ludo King
Monument Valley
Monument Valley 2
Monument Valley 3
Rainbow Six: SMOL
Raji: An Ancient Epic
SpongeBob: Bubble Pop F.U.N.
TED Tumblewords
The Case of the Golden Idol
The Rise of the Golden Idol
Vineyard Valley

The best OS for handhelds is…

As portable gaming becomes more popular, Ars Technica tested the two biggest handheld PC gaming operating systems, SteamOS and Windows 11, to see which performs the best. Their result: games run faster on SteamOS.

In their testing, Ars used the Lenovo Legion Go S, the first gaming portable explicitly designed to work with either Windows 11 or Steam OS. They tested five high-end 3D games released in the last five years. You can see more of the results in the article, but we included one of their benchmarks below.

While the results show SteamOS currently has an advantage, Microsoft recently pledged to focus on Windows 11’s performance on handhelds. Time will tell if they can take the lead.

Side Quests (more stories worth reading)

🇺🇸 Check out our post on 13 games to celebrate America’s Independence Day.

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🔫 Details from a developer-only Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 playtest have been accidentally released to all fans on the Call of Duty app.

📺 Also, Beavis and Butt-Head are coming to Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Warzone.

🏎️ Fans hate the new Mario Kart World patch, as it makes it harder for players to have a standard three-lap race online.

😥 For the fourth time in 18 months, Microsoft is planning to announce another wave of layoffs in its Xbox division.

😧 If you are planning to mod Stalker 2, it will require about 700GB of hard drive space.

💰 While employees at Electronic Arts are taking home less than they have made the past two years, their company’s CEO will make $5 million more than last year.

🎮 Updates are forthcoming to fix the compatibility issues some digital cameras have with the Switch 2.

🐸 How Frogger 2’s source code was recovered from a destroyed tape.

🇳🇱 Sony is facing a lawsuit in the Netherlands over the high prices of its digital games.

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🥽 Microsoft teamed up with Meta to create a limited edition Meta Quest 3S Xbox Edition. It’s black.

😥 The Studio behind MindsEye has started mass layoffs, with more than 100 staff members potentially being affected.

📈 Round numbers: FBC: Firebreak topped 1 million players and Peak sold 2 million copies in nine days.