With the PlayStation Vita not exactly turning into the runaway success Sony had hoped for, the company is looking to other devices to put its games into players’ pockets. By March of 2018, PlayStation will release at least five games on iOS and Android.
Sony’s ‘ForwardWorks’ will be responsible for the smartphone games. The company began this practice back in March following a restructuring that turned Sony Computer Entertainment into Sony Interactive Entertainment. The plan to move PlayStation games to smartphones — “full-fledged gaming titles,” no less — was actually first revealed at that time.
“ForwardWorks will leverage the intellectual property of the numerous PlayStation dedicated software titles and its gaming characters, as well as the knowledge and know-how of gaming development expertise which was acquired over the years with PlayStation business to provide gaming application optimized for smart devices including smartphones to users in Japan and Asia,” Sony said when ForwardWorks was first unveiled.
As the first announcement suggested, the smartphone games will first be released in Japan and will then roll out to other Asian countries. A PlayStation representative told the Wall Street Journal that there are no plans to bring the games to Europe or the United States at this time.
The move to dedicated smartphone games comes after years of Sony’s “PlayStation minis” program, which brought bite-sized games to the PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation Vita. Games that would feel right at home on a smartphone, particularly Uncharted: Fight for Fortune, were also released digitally to the Vita. We’re excited for just about anything Sony wants to bring to mobile, unless it happens to be Invizimals.
Though the PlayStation 4 continues to succeed and its PlayStation VR peripheral is sold out just about everywhere, Sony’s lead over the competition has been narrowed in recent months. After a very strong showing in North America over its first few years, the PlayStation 4 has sold fewer units than the Xbox One for three months in a row.
