Netflix acquires Spry Fox indie game studio

Indie developer Spry Fox who previously released the delightful title Cozy Grove back in 2021 shared a major announcement today. Specifically, that it is joining Netflix as the company’s sixth in-house games studio.

The news was shared in a blog post by Spry Fox in which the team outlined what this means for previously released games like Cozy Grove, while also touching on some of the projects that are in development.

Not going to bury the lede: It’s our great pleasure to announce that Spry Fox is joining Netflix, where we will become the sixth in-house games studio! What does this mean for Spry Fox? It means:

- We can continue making the games that we were already making and wanted to make, but with more support and resources to make those games better and bring them to more people around the world.
- We can stop stressing about how our games generate profit on our games and instead focus exclusively on making them as enjoyable and fulfilling to our players as possible.
- We can collaborate with other creative people within Netflix to hopefully get better at what we do and how we do it.

And what does this mean for our existing games? They’ll remain downloadable and available in their current forms on their current platforms. What about development efforts on new games? Everyone at Spry Fox was already focused on making Cozy Grove 2 as well as a larger, non-violent MMO that we still haven’t revealed much about publicly, and that is still the case. So there’s no change in our current development efforts.

As noted by the Spry Fox team, the studio remains focused on making a sequel to Cozy Grove in addition to developing a larger “non-violent MMO” that has currently yet to be publicly announced. The post then shares how the team has been active for almost 13 years, notes that the studio is one that aims to develop original, world-class cozy games, and that “Netflix is going to help us do that.”

In the past, we reviewed Spry Fox’s charming indie Cozy Grove and gave it high praise. Scoring it a 9, reviewer TJ Denzer remarked that, “Cozy Grove is a far more relaxing, yet in-depth experience than I ever could have expected when I jumped into it.”

For more on this, be sure to read through our review of Cozy Grove in full, and for more indie game goodness, check out some of our previous coverage including a recap of the indies shown during the Shacknews Indie Showcase back in October.