by Dave Albarado

Red Light, Green Light: Squid Game is the most watched game in town

From time to time, Hoop Insider, deviates from real sports issues as this corner chooses to talk about the biggest in town—nay, in the world—in the world of Netflix.

The consumption of entertainment has changed with the arrival of Netflix. What makes Netflix unique is the bevy of original shows such as Stranger Things, (which featured my favorite school supply back in elementary and high school, the Trapper Keeper)—or The Witcher—even the Lupin spin-off from the anime series. Shows like the live action version of Samurai X has made Netflix a must have during the pandemic. Where can you get the deal of having unlimited shows for only P150 on your mobile phone?

This brings me to the most watched game in town—Squid Game.

To those who haven’t watched the Squid Game series on Netflix—I will not bombard you with spoilers. Trust me, there will be no spoilers here.

What makes the series totally astounding is what the receptionist has gotten.

Here’s a tweet by official account of Netflix where it wrote: “It only took 17 days and 111M global fans to become our biggest ever series at launch (and the first to surpass 100M when it premiered).”

A spokesperson for Netflix confirmed to The Verge’s Catie Keck that these figures track how many accounts (not people) watched the series for at least two minutes.

I finished the entire series twice and now I am in the middle of my third.

This is a great news to Hwang Dong-hyuk who created the series. It is not widely known that the story was rejected by various Korean production companies back in 2008. 

With 111 million accounts under its belt (or at least, 111 million accounts who watched the show for two minutes), Squid Game — an Asian series in a non-English language — is handily beating all other shows on the Netflix platform.