PlayStation Mobile Games Might Not Be Direct Ports Of PS Titles

Mobile gaming continues to be big business, especially in the past year or so when people around the world were mostly forced indoors and onto the virtual world due to the pandemic. Despite its popularity, however, some franchises and big names in the gaming industry are still absent from that space. Sony's PlayStation has long been a holdout from direct involvement in mobile gaming but that might be changing soon, just not in the ways some might have hoped.

The PlayStation has, of course, hundreds of titles under its roof over the course of its decades-long history. Some of those have even made it smartphones, though mostly through unofficial and legally dubious means. Some fans of those titles would probably love to play those on their mobile devices but that's not exactly going to happen that way.

Instead, Sony will adopt a strategy similar to what Nintendo has done with some of its games on Android and iOS. GameSpot reports that PlayStation head Jim Ryan raised the topic of the PlayStation brand coming to mobile at the company's recent Corporate Strategy meeting. There, the exec said that "PlayStation has a huge catalog of diverse first-party IP that can transition to smartphone gaming and complement our AAA games or live service games."

It bears noting that Ryan talks about IP, the business and legal term used to refer to properties, franchises, brands, and characters. It's more likely that Sony will create new games around those popular IPs designed specifically for mobile rather than port existing titles. The latter is at least technically possible though, as the mobile emulation scene has proven.

Whether it fares better than Nintendo in that strategy remains to be seen. Nintendo brought a couple of its well-known characters and franchises to mobile, including the iconic Mario, but few have actually proven to be even remotely profitable. Some do say that Nintendo just doesn't get mobile anyway and Sony might have better chances in that regard since it does make its own Xperia smartphones.