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Sony Playstation Chief John Kodera (successor to Andrew House) says he sees a future in portable gaming with Playstation.
According to this Bloomberg article, Kodera, portable gaming should be considered an important member of the Playstation family, and that Sony is carrying out various experiments “in the field.” He apparently went on to hint that the next home console would be “closely integrated” with portable devices, but isn’t ready to get into specifics just yet. Kodera also highlighted Sony’s experimentation with PlayLink, which allows players to interact with PS4 games via their smartphone, before saying “we want to think about many options.” Sony opened up their own mobile games unit back in 2016 called ForwardWorks, whose most popular title thus far has been Everybody’s Golf (or Hot Shots Golf in English) which has seen 5 million downloads.
Of course, this revelation comes as a bit of a surprise, as Sony just officially began putting the final nails in the coffin for the Vita, their notoriously (and sadly) maligned handheld console. It’s also worth noting that back in September 2017, Andrew House said that the wildly successful Nintendo Switch is “a hybrid device, and that’s a different approach and strategy…We have no seen that as being a huge market opportunity.” Which is an interesting take, and sounds like they may be letting Nintendo corner the hybrid-console market not in spite of its success, but because of it, opting for a potential larger reach on the smartphone platform. I guess we’ll find out between now and 2021 how that will play out for them.
What do you think? I personally love my Vita to bits and am sad to see Sony so eager to sweep it under the rug, whereas in regards to gaming, I find my smartphone to be just “okay” with anything that isn’t AR related (see: Pokemon GO). Let us know what you think of Sony’s strategy in the comments and be sure to check out our article on Kodera’s comments regarding the Playstation 5! and the new PS4 gamepad taking on Xbox’s Elite controller!
SOURCE: Bloomberg