Mike Verdu has resigned as senior vice president at EA Mobile.
Mike Verdu is the new head of game development at Netflix.
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Netflix hires Oculus and EA veteran Mike Verdu to lead games

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 2 min

Netflix has hired former Oculus and EA game development leader Mike Verdu to head its fledgling game efforts.

The company has been hiring game people for a while, and Verdu is the biggest name yet to come on board at the streaming service for movies and TV shows. The move shows the company is serious about expanding into games, which Netflix CEO Reed Hastings once described (pointing out Fortnite in particular) as Netflix’s biggest competition for the time of its customers.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.