Netflix jumps further into gaming with acquisition of Ready Player Me

Netflix has acquired Ready Player Me, a platform for creating avatars. It comes as the company moves deeper and deeper into the gaming arena.

The acquisition will give Netflix subscribers the chance to create customized avatars that can be used across gaming titles. It is a similar system to that found on other gaming networks.

At the moment, details of the deals are a little scant, and it is not known how much money is changing hands. TechCrunch reports that “of the four founders Rainer Selvet, Haver Järveoja, Kaspar Tiri, and Timmu Tõke, only CTO Rainer Selvet is moving to Netflix”.

While we know that Ready Player One’s services will wind down on January 31, 2026, no information about when avatars will land on Netflix has been shared at this stage.

In a post to his LinkedIn profile, Ready Player Me CEO Timmu Tõke wrote:

I’m excited to announce that Ready Player Me has been acquired by Netflix.

Our team will be joining Netflix to contribute to their gaming strategy with our cross-game avatar tech, enabling players to carry their identities and fandom across games.

We started the company 12 years ago with Rainer, Kaspar and Haver. We were 20-year-olds from small towns in Estonia. We knew nothing about tech or startups, but were obsessed with avatars. Over the last 12 years, we have built many different products around avatars, from hardware scanners to personal avatar tech and eventually launching Ready Player Me more than 5 years ago.

I’m very proud of the work with did with Ready Player Me, pushing cross-game interoperability further than anyone else before and serving thousands of developers.

We learned a lot as founders throughout those years and managed to build an incredible team that worked very hard to build this company. We were lucky to raise $72m and work with some of the best investors in the world. I’m incredibly grateful for the support and partnership from Andreessen Horowitz, Plural, Konvoy, Riccardo Zacconi, Sebastian Knutsson, Marc Petit, Joshua S. Duyan, Startup Wise Guys and our earliest backers Mart Habakuk and Estonian Business School. There were many others that supported and helped us along the way, thank you to all of you!

Our vision has always been to enable avatars and identities to travel across many games and virtual worlds. We’ve been on an independent path to make that vision a reality for a long time. I’m now very excited for the Ready Player Me team to join Netflix to scale our tech and expertise to a global audience and contribute to the exciting vision Netflix has for gaming.