Netflix is opening a new game development studio led by former Overwatch executive producer Chacko Sonny. He originally left Blizzard back in September 2021.

The news was announced by Netflix games vice president Mike Verdu during a discussion at the ongoing TechCrunch Disrupt event.

In a statement, he said (via VGC):

“We are starting another organic new studio in Southern California, this time around Chacko Sonny, who oversaw production on God of War Ascenion for Santa Monica and oversaw a portofilo of their games, and then was executive producer of a little game franchise called Overwatch.

He could have gone anywhere, he could have raised money, he could have done anything and he chose to come here. We are building a team around him and looking to him to reinvent what games can be.

You don’t get people like that coming to your organisation to build the next big thing in gaming unless there’s a sense that we’re in it for the long haul and the right reasons.”

Verdu also confirmed that Netflix will still feature third-party games from other developers and publishers, despite opening their own game development studios.

He added:

“I think you need both. You need to harness the incredible creative firepower of the global gaming ecosystem, and so our external games pillar is as important as our internal games.

But with internal games, we want to build institutional competence. We want teams to go through multiple cycles together and essentially get really, really good at working together and delivering great products, and sometimes the only way you can do that is to give them the space inside of the organisation.”

Netflix already offers several games on its service, which are available at no extra charge to anyone who has a Netflix subscription. Most recently, they added Oxenfree to their library of games.