Netflix piqued the interest of gamers in December when it announced a “newly reimagined FIFA football simulation game” for the 2026 men’s FIFA World Cup.
The tech company is best known for streaming movies and TV shows, and while it had been pushing into live sports for a few years, its video game unit has been a relative unknown. Delivering the first FIFA-branded simulation game since soccer’s governing body stopped licensing its brand to publishing giant EA Sports in 2022 created high expectations for the fledgling Netflix group created less than five years ago.
Netflix and third-party developer Delphi Interactive fully released FIFA World Cup: Launch Edition for the streaming service’s subscribers on Thursday after a week of public beta testing. Anyone who thought the game would look just like a FIFA title from EA Sports was in for a surprise. FIFA World Cup: Launch Edition has far more rudimentary graphics than most modern sports simulation games.
But to Netflix, the visual discrepancy is not a source of embarrassment. Cutting-edge graphics were not developers’ objective.
“To some of them, it looks like an older [version of the former] FIFA [game], and I wanted to say it plays [like] even an older FIFA because again, to us, it’s capturing the fun,” Alain Tascan, Netflix’s president of games, said. “Are we going to look like a super high-definition console game or a high-end PC game? Absolutely not. But we feel that it’s capturing the fun that’s the most important.”
