At long last, one of my favorite party game providers, Jackbox Games, is finally gearing up for a beta version of its games coming to smart TVs and ‘other platforms’ in spring 2025, meaning it’s a great time to be an owner of the best smart TVs.
The gaming company announced a new app for smart TVs and other platforms that will let you play a selected range of its popular party games. Unfortunately, the app will have ads, but my excitement has eclipsed this downside.
Known for its catalog of multi-player party games that are perfect for throwing shade at your best friends, Jackbox’s range of interactive games usually come in ‘Party Packs’ consisting of a handful of different games you can play at your leisure once purchased.
Until now, the Jackbox gaming service has only been accessible on PC or game consoles, meaning that it hasn’t always been easy to play it on a big screen. You can also subscribe to Jackbox Games on Amazon’s Luna cloud gaming service for a monthly fee of $4.99, but this dedicated app for smart TVs, among other devices, should make it much easier.
According to the official Jackbox blog post, the company has voiced its desire to make its services more accessible: “it has always been our goal to bring these games to as many people as possible and make them as easy to play as we can. That is why we are announcing a new Jackbox app that will allow you to play Jackbox Games on your smart TV and other platforms”.
The smart TV version of its service will function in a partnership with AWS GameLift Streams that “allows (us) to quickly launch and stream games to all sorts of devices from smart TVs to web applications.”
Instead of purchasing individual Party Packs, the smart TV version of Jackbox will offer a small collection of ad-supported games for free before introducing a subscription fee that gives users full access to its entire catalog. Pricing is not yet known for this as of yet, though.
As it stands, there’s not a lot of information as to what smart TV models will support the app or which countries will have access first. However, we’re assuming that Jackbox will go into further detail closer to the launch.
