Five family franchises - The Smurfs, Garfield, Kao the Kangaroo, My Universe and Asterix - account for 41.5% of the play hours logged by the most loyal players on PHYND, a free cloud gaming service for smart televisions, according to player data the company circulated on October 30, 2026. Among players who return less often, the same franchises take 24.2% of play hours.

PHYND defines its most loyal players as those who have come back to the service three or more times, and says that group produces 81% of all gameplay. The company did not say how many players, sessions or hours sit behind any of the percentages, or which months the data covers. It has not published the figures in its online newsroom.

The numbers arrived dressed in somebody else's research. PHYND set them against a survey Samsung published on October 27, in which 79% of American parents said they wish they spent more quality time with their children. PHYND does not appear in Samsung's material. Samsung's post promotes Amazon Luna's GameNight lineup on Samsung Gaming Hub - the same TV gaming storefront on which, according to PHYND, its own beta has run in the United States since May 18, 2026.

In Short

PHYND streams free video games to smart TVs and pays for them with ads, and it says its most regular players spend a large share of their time on games starring characters like the Smurfs and Garfield. That matters to advertisers, because it hints that the people seeing ads on these games may often be families and children, although PHYND has not shown who is actually playing. The figures come without basic details such as how many players were counted or over which months, so they describe a pattern on one young service rather than proof of how families spend their time.

Three findings, three yardsticks

PHYND presented three trends from its player data. Each uses a different measure, and two use different definitions of a loyal player.

Family franchises and repeat play

The first finding measures play hours. According to PHYND, The Smurfs, Garfield, Kao the Kangaroo, My Universe and Asterix make up 41.5% of play hours among players who have returned three or more times, against 24.2% for players the company calls lighter users. PHYND did not define the term. The most natural reading is players with fewer than three return visits, but PHYND did not say so, and it did not say which individual games within each franchise were counted.

The comparison also depends on what the service carries. PHYND runs a curated catalogue, not an open store, and it did not disclose how many titles it offers or what share of the catalogue these five franchises represent. A franchise that supplies a large part of the library will tend to supply a large part of play time. Without the catalogue size, the 41.5% cannot be separated from the shape of the shelf.

Afternoon versus late night

The second finding switches to sessions and to a stricter cohort. According to PHYND, 31.8% of sessions from the players it calls its most dedicated - those with 10 or more return visits - fall between 12pm and 5pm Eastern Time, against 26.6% for lighter users. Late-night play, between 9pm and 5am, accounts for 17.9% of dedicated players' sessions against 26.6% for lighter users.

Two details stand out. The first is that the lighter-user figure is 26.6% for both the afternoon window and the late-night window. That is arithmetically possible, but the repetition is unusual enough that PHYND's wording leaves open whether one of the two numbers is a transcription error. The second is that the lighter-user group now sits against a 10-visit threshold rather than a three-visit one, so the lighter group in this comparison may include players counted as loyal in the first.

The windows themselves are stated in Eastern Time. If every session was clocked to Eastern Time regardless of where the player sits, as the wording suggests, the 12pm to 5pm slot is 9am to 2pm for a player in California, and the 9pm to 5am late-night slot begins at 6pm Pacific - early evening, not late night. PHYND did not say whether it converted sessions to local time.

PHYND also gave no figure for the remaining hours. By PPC Land's arithmetic, 50.3% of dedicated players' sessions fall outside the two published windows, in the morning or in the 5pm to 9pm evening slot, and so do 46.8% of lighter users' sessions. The evening slot is the one most closely tied to family television viewing, and it is the one the release leaves out.

There is no split between weekdays and weekends either. On a weekday, a noon to 5pm window overlaps most of the US school day. PHYND did not state the data period, but its Samsung beta began on May 18 and its Fire TV beta on August 11, according to the company, so a window running from launch would include the summer school break.

Racing as a shared-screen genre

The third finding carries no number. According to PHYND, racing is the genre most played on a shared screen, and its top titles are Smurfs Kart, Offroad Racing: Buggy x ATV x Moto, Urban Trial Playground and Garfield Kart 2. The company did not say whether the ranking is by play hours, sessions or players, and it gave no data on how often two or more people play at the same time - the measure that would actually show a screen being shared.

PHYND describes all four racing titles as easy to pick up and E-rated. Records from the Entertainment Software Rating Board confirm an E (Everyone) rating for the console or PC versions of each: Smurfs Kart carries a descriptor for mild cartoon violence, while Offroad Racing, Urban Trial Playground and Garfield Kart 2 - All You Can Drift carry none. Kao the Kangaroo, one of the five family franchises in the first finding, is rated E10+ for its 2022 release, with descriptors for animated blood, comic mischief and fantasy violence. Those ratings cover the versions sold on consoles and PC; none of the rating records mentions PHYND's streamed builds.

The ratings records also show where the catalogue comes from. Microids publishes Smurfs Kart, Offroad Racing and Garfield Kart 2. Tate Multimedia publishes Urban Trial Playground and Kao the Kangaroo. Both publishers were named among the suppliers of PHYND's Fire TV beta catalogue when it launched, according to The Desk.

What the data does not show

Nothing in PHYND's figures identifies who is playing. The data records which games are played and when; it does not record household composition, the age of the player or the number of people in front of the screen. The company presented its numbers as a match for Samsung's survey, but the survey asked about wishes and difficulties, and PHYND's data measures game choice and time of day. The bridge between the two is the company's framing rather than a published result.

The basic dimensions are missing as well:

  • No count of players, sessions or play hours.
  • No start or end date for the data.
  • No definition of a return visit - whether it means a new day, a new session or a new game launch.
  • No breakdown by platform, although PHYND now runs on Samsung, LG and Fire TV devices.
  • No geography beyond the Eastern Time stamp.

Even the 81% concentration figure is hard to place. PHYND says players with three or more return visits account for 81% of all gameplay, without saying whether gameplay means hours or sessions. On its own, the share says nothing about how large either group is.

The survey PHYND borrowed

The parent statistics come from Samsung, not PHYND. Samsung's post, published on the Samsung U.S. Newsroom on October 27, 2026 under the headline "79% of Parents Want More Family Time, The Answer Is Already in the Living Room," reports that 79% of parents wish they were spending more quality time with their children, 87% say the holiday season is an important time for shared activities, 80% want options that make it easy to spend time together at home, 58% find it hard to identify activities the whole family enjoys, and 84% "admit to at least sometimes multitasking on their devices" during family time.

According to Samsung's methodology note, the findings are "based on a Samsung Gaming Hub survey, with online data collection provided by Ipsos." Fieldwork ran from September 29 to October 2, 2026, as part of the Ipsos omnibus, with a nationally representative online sample of 1,803 US adults aged 18 to 64, surveyed in English. The credibility interval is plus or minus 2.8 percentage points for all respondents and plus or minus 4.5 points for the 727 respondents with minor children in the household - the base on which every parent figure rests. Samsung did not publish question wording or answer scales. PPC Land covered the post on October 28, noting that none of the five parent figures mentions games or televisions.

Samsung's own commercial claim in the post concerns Samsung, not PHYND. Kevin Beatty, Head of Product for Samsung Visual Display, said that "over the past year, we've seen unique users playing casual and party games on Samsung TVs grow more than 90% in North America and more than 200% globally." Samsung gave no starting base for either figure. The post's product pitch is Amazon Luna, whose GameNight titles turn phones into controllers and come at no additional cost to Prime members. Marie Shanley, described as a Digital Well-being Consultant, is quoted saying that "Technology doesn't have to be something that pulls families apart."

PHYND's framing therefore rests on a survey commissioned by Samsung's gaming business to promote a different service on a storefront both companies use. That does not make PHYND's data wrong. It does mean the 79% figure says nothing about PHYND in particular.

What PHYND is

PHYND, which styles its name PHȲND, describes itself on its website as a way to "play great games for free on their Smart TV," with "No consoles," "No downloads" and "No subscriptions." It is an ad-funded cloud gaming service: games run on remote servers and stream to the television, which removes the need for local hardware beyond a controller, a TV remote or a smartphone.

The company's site is pitched as much at game developers as at players. "You build once. We make it run everywhere," it says, promising distribution "across hundreds of millions of Smart TVs." PHYND says it is "free-to-play and fully monetized," listing "Ad revenue with non-intrusive, Smart TV-optimized formats," "In-game transactions" and "Engagement and revenue analytics." For developers it offers "Smart TV promotional placements," "Featured placement across PHȲND" and "Brand-sponsored game play," along with "Quests and campaigns," "Integrated rewards and promotions" and "Player insights." The site does not describe any ad format in detail, an ad load per session, or prices.

The corporate history is short. PHYND raised a $10 million seed round on February 11, 2025, led by Wellington Management with Bessemer Venture Partners, Connecticut Innovations Fund and the former US international footballer Jozy Altidore, according to the company's announcement at the time. Its founder and chief executive, André Swanston, previously co-founded Tru Optik, a CTV audience data company that TransUnion acquired in 2020. A partnership with Samsung for Samsung Smart TVs was announced on August 19, 2025.

On January 6, 2026, PHYND named Magnite its ad tech monetisation launch partner, using Magnite's SpringServe ad server and programmatic capabilities for direct and programmatic sales, according to a joint release. That release said advertisers would be able to reach players by demographics, interests and play behaviour; it gave no financial terms. Magnite, a supply-side platform, announced an exclusive deal for Roblox's rewarded video inventory on the same day.

Distribution followed in stages, according to PHYND's newsroom: a US beta on Samsung Gaming Hub on May 18, 2026; a US beta on LG smart TVs from 2021 or later, running webOS 6.0 or higher, on July 24, 2026; and a US beta on Amazon Fire TV devices on August 11, 2026, covering several Fire TV Stick models, Fire TV Cube and Amazon's Ember smart TVs. The FAQ on the company's player site still describes LG and Fire TV support as forthcoming.

Why the marketing community is watching TV games

PHYND is a small entrant in a category that larger companies have been testing as advertising inventory. Microsoft began internal tests of a free, ad-supported tier of Xbox Cloud Gaming on October 3, 2025, with about two minutes of pre-roll before play, sessions capped at one hour and a five-hour monthly limit. Nvidia brought GeForce NOW to Fire TV in February 2026 as a subscription service with a free tier. Amazon Luna and Mattel scheduled a phone-controlled He-Man couch co-op game for June 5, 2026, included with Prime.

For TV sellers, games add a new surface on the same screen. Samsung began opening its smart TV home screens to programmatic buying through The Trade Desk and DV360 in June, with Magnite's SpringServe as ad server - the same ad server PHYND uses. Outside the living room, EA turned more than 1 billion monthly EA SPORTS FC matches into ad inventory when EA Advertising launched on June 15, 2026. The IAB's gaming measurement guidelines, released on June 26, 2025, sort display formats into intrinsic in-game, rewarded, sponsorship, interstitial and adjacent placements - a vocabulary PHYND's material does not yet use.

Gaming still takes a small slice of the day next to video. Playing games occupied 24 minutes a day, or 8% of American leisure time, against 2 hours 37 minutes for video, in the Video Advertising Bureau's reading of the 2025 American Time Use Survey.

PHYND's time-of-day data matters to buyers who plan television by daypart, and its racing claim touches on co-viewing, since an ad shown on a shared screen may reach more than one person. Neither point can be tested with what the company has released.

The children question

The franchise finding raises a question PHYND's material does not address. Repeat play concentrated on Smurfs, Garfield and E-rated kart racers suggests that some players may be children, and an ad-supported service that targets by play behaviour then sits close to the COPPA line, which bars collecting personal information from children under 13 without verifiable parental consent. PHYND did not say how it identifies child players or whether sessions on family titles are treated as directed at children.

Regulators and rivals have been active on precisely this boundary. San Diego County sued AppLovin on October 5, 2026 over adult advertising in children's mobile games, seeking civil penalties of up to $2,500 per violation. OpenX introduced a PRIVO-audited marketplace for children's CTV ads the same day. Roblox made SuperAwesome its only third-party partner for under-13 contextual advertising in June 2026. For a service presenting family franchises as the engine of its loyalty, the release contains no statement on child-directed play.

Timeline

Summary

Who: PHYND, a Stamford, Connecticut-based free cloud gaming service for smart TVs led by founder and chief executive André Swanston, with context from Samsung and its Ipsos-run survey of 1,803 US adults.

What: PHYND says five family franchises - The Smurfs, Garfield, Kao the Kangaroo, My Universe and Asterix - account for 41.5% of play hours among players with three or more return visits, against 24.2% for lighter users; that players with 10 or more return visits put 31.8% of sessions in the 12pm to 5pm Eastern window and 17.9% late at night; and that racing titles rated E lead play. It gave no sample size, data period or player demographics.

When: PHYND circulated the data on October 30, 2026, three days after Samsung published the survey, whose fieldwork ran from September 29 to October 2, 2026.

Where: PHYND runs in beta in the United States on Samsung Gaming Hub, LG smart TVs and Amazon Fire TV devices.

Why: Ad-supported games on television are emerging as a new form of CTV inventory, and PHYND sells ads through Magnite. Data suggesting that repeat play centres on family titles in the afternoon bears on how buyers plan dayparts and on how child-directed play is handled under COPPA, which the company's material does not address.