Netflix predictably claims a huge number of people watched Squid Game 2

As far as we can tell, Netflix now has only a single big move in its marketing arsenal: Releasing something with relatively little pomp and circumstance, letting it apparently fall completely out of the public’s mind for a few weeks, and then popping up to say, “Hey, you won’t believe how many people (who you’ve never met) watched that thing we released.”

This observation brought to you by musing on the streamer’s latest effort to hype up Squid Game 2, the second season of its South Korean murder game import, which Netflix would like you to know an unbelievable number of people have watched. According to Variety, roughly 152 million people have now watched the season, which released last Christmas, making it the third-most-watched season of TV on the streamer all-time, after the original Squid Game, and then Wednesday.

Which, fair enough: Even if we quibble with what a “viewer” is—the streamer likes to play very loose with how much of a show has to be consumed before it counts as a “view,” sometimes counting just a few minutes of watching—overall viewers, all-time, is still a better metric than Netflix’s usual schtick of trying to give itself new “records” by saying a show achieved the most views on the second Sunday of a month with an E in the name, or whatever. But your humble Newswire writer will also note, as the person who drove himself mildly nuts writing reviews of all seven episodes of that second season, that the new season’s cultural impact was felt distinctly like it’s nowhere near what the first season achieved. That first run was a genuine organic groundswell of interest in the dark horse series, which is why actual human beings you’ve met were actually watching and talking about the damn thing. Instead of just Netflix marketing executives, and also, again, your humble Newswire writer, who was not a fun person to try to talk to about anything that wasn’t Squid Game during the holidays last year.

Squid Game is set to return for its third season some time in 2025, which is good, because that second season just sort of craps out in the middle, yeah? It will, of course, be record-breaking, no matter how hard Netflix has to look for a record for it to break.