Sony is working on expanding its gaming ecosystem into mobile and already has internal studios developing games for the platform. A few years ago, the Japanese company began expanding into the PC gaming space, which has been somewhat successful, though there haven’t been many releases so far. And recently PlayStation Studios confirmed that it plans to stagger the PC release of PS5 games by about two to three years.
PlayStation will also be moving more aggressively into cloud gaming, with CEO Jim Ryan revealing that the company’s plans for growth in that space will be shared in the coming months. In a business call on May 23, Ryan stated that Sony and PlayStation are aware that cloud gaming and portability are increasingly important to gamers, and the company is beginning to focus more heavily on those two aspects of the industry.
In that vein, Sony confirmed in a recent presentation that it has already come up with a mobile strategy that will entail bringing some of the company’s most popular properties to the portable platform. It was revealed that “multiple internal studios [are] working on mobile games,” though only Savage Game Studios was specifically mentioned. Additionally, the company is interested in both developing and publishing mobile games, so Sony will be open to development opportunities with external studios, as well as investments and acquisitions.
A chart included in the presentation shows that Sony expects mobile games to make up about 5% of its portfolio in 2023, with that number growing to 10% by 2025. This is slightly less than the chart released in August 2022 (which listed a target of 20% mobile games by 2025) when Sony acquired Savage Game Studios and announced its plans to expand into mobile. Either way, that means that there may be some mobile game announcements coming this year.
The 2023 edition of the highly anticipated PlayStation Showcase took place on May 24, and there were no mobile games anywhere to be seen. It’s unclear how fans will react when the first PlayStation mobile games are revealed, but the response to Diablo Immortal's announcement may be a good predictor of what the company can expect when it confirms that some fan-favorite and long-loved franchises will be making the jump to mobile.
To further show its interest in moving into mobile gaming, PlayStation finally unveiled its Project Q handheld gaming device. Though not precisely what some people were hoping for, being only for streaming from the PS5 via Remote Play and not a standalone platform, Project Q has some perks in its favor. It sports an 8-inch HD screen and the same features as the PS5’s DualSense controller. Not much is known about the device yet, but many people were excited to finally see it revealed.
Source: Sony (PDF)
