Netflix’s Sesame Street Deal Includes Gaming

This week Netflix announced a streaming deal with Sesame Workshop, bringing Sesame Street’s 56th season and 90 hours of past episodes to its platform, alongside continued airing on PBS Kids. As part of this agreement, Netflix acquired rights to develop video games based on Sesame Street and its spinoff, Sesame Street Mecha Builders. 

Netflix’s recent redesign puts a greater emphasis on games, so the Sesame Steet deal meets Netflix’s broader push into kids’ gaming, leveraging familiar intellectual properties (IP) to engage young audiences.

Netflix’s strategy, as outlined by kids’ gaming chief Lisa Burgess, focuses on creating interactive experiences with beloved characters. The games are expected to mirror the approach of Netflix’s World of Peppa Pig app, which includes mini-games and videos centered on puzzle-solving, memory, counting, object recognition, and matching patterns, tailored for preschoolers with adjustable difficulty levels. 

For Sesame Street, potential scenarios include interactive settings like Cookie Monster’s “Cookie Cart” or Abby’s Fairy Garden, designed to foster educational skills such as literacy, math, and social-emotional learning, consistent with the show’s ethos. The games aim to provide both active engagement and passive entertainment, such as nursery rhymes and read-along stories, with regular content updates to maintain engagement.

Netflix’s data from kids’ profiles and family viewing habits will inform game design, ensuring age-appropriate transitions from preschool to older audiences, similar to how the platform adjusts content recommendations. This deal follows Netflix’s acquisition of Peppa Pig streaming rights and its accompanying World of Peppa Pig game, signaling a strategic focus on expanding its kids’ gaming portfolio with trusted IPs.

The 2025 Common Sense Census, conducted by Common Sense Media, reports a 65% increase in gaming time among U.S. children ages 0-8 since 2020, with 5- to 8-year-olds specifically increasing from 40 to 64 minutes per day. The growth underscores a shift from traditional TV to interactive digital platforms, with mobile gaming dominating due to accessibility—58% of 4-year-olds and 25% of 8-year-olds own tablets or cellphones.