Ever since Nintendo found great success with Pokemon GO, Sony has not hidden the fact that it’s looking to give mobile platforms another go. The company’s new studio ForwardWorks was tasked with leading this new expansion to mobile and today, the said division of Sony debuted Project Field, a toys-to-life product designed to combine physical card games with virtual playing fields powered by smartphones and tablets. However, that’s not everything Sony has in mind for the near future.
More specifically, the company just announced plans to start releasing new mobile games as of next April. All of the upcoming titles will be based on existing Sony PlayStation franchises, and many of them will launch alongside various companion gadgets similar to Nintendo’s Pokemon GO Plus. While Sony has yet to reveal specific titles slated for release next year, the Japanese entertainment company did state that it’s planning to publish games based on the PaRappa the Rapper and Everybody’s Golf series. Given the nature of both of these franchises, this heavily implies Sony will be targeting a casual audience with these upcoming releases.
Tomoki Kawaguchi, a Sony executive leading the company’s latest expansion into mobile, said that this initiative will make the most of the existing PlayStation franchises, which may suggest that we’ll see an Uncharted mobile game in the future, or maybe another God of War title designed for playing on the go. Unfortunately, Kawaguchi didn’t reveal what kind of business model Sony’s upcoming mobile games will utilize, but it’s possible that the company will opt for a variety of monetization methods depending on the title in question. Sony’s executive also revealed that the firm is planning to release five mobile games between April of 2017 and April of 2018. Not all of the titles will be developed in-house as at least one of them will be a product of collaboration between Sony and Square Enix.
Unfortunately, for now, all of these games will be released exclusively in Japan. On the bright side, back when Sony first announced its latest expansion into mobile space, the Japanese firm described its decision as a worldwide initiative, which suggests Sony’s mobile games will also make their way to customers in the West. With that in mind, it’s possible that the company opted to use Japan as a testing ground and only globally release its best performers.