Nuked Hello my fellow tech enthusiasts, it’s your favorite funny guy Nuked here to talk about Sony PlayStation’s new smartphone games team. Sony has set a goal of having 20 percent of their new games on smartphones by 2025, and to help achieve this they announced a new PlayStation Studios Mobile Division last August. But what exactly is this new division and what can we expect from it?
According to 17 current and former job postings, it seems that PlayStation Studios Mobile is more of a cross-functional management, strategy, licensing, and support team. They will be responsible for figuring out which PlayStation intellectual property would be best suited for mobile phones, and then dishing out that licensed IP to internal and external game studios alike. They will also oversee the development of these games to ensure that they meet Sony’s quality standards.
Many of the job roles ask for a “proven track record” with free-to-play games specifically. While there is only one game designer role listed so far, it seems that the focus will be on supporting the game design for internal projects and providing consultation for projects with external partners on mobile F2P systems, economy management, and retention features.
It’s worth noting that Sony has had mixed success with smartphone gaming in the past. This will be their third attempt at getting into the market following their failed PlayStation Mobile platform and WayForward studio that only produced two games specifically for the Japanese market. However, many successful first-party and third-party games have come out of Sony’s PlayStation Studios in the past.
Some of the postings describe the group as a “small but quickly growing team” where employees will “wear many hats and contribute to the nascent culture for mobile game design at PlayStation Studios while championing the efforts across the company.” It seems that there is real interest in tapping Sony’s internal studios to produce games for the mobile division if those efforts are successful.
Currently, most job roles are for product managers and external producers in San Mateo and Amsterdam. Sony is also hiring a Director of Mobile Engineering and a product strategy analyst. Some of their recent hires include Nicola Sebastiani as head of mobile and Olivier Courtemanche as head of mobile product.
We’re excited to see what Sony’s new smartphone games team will come up with. They have already acquired Savage Game Studios to produce mobile games, and their job postings show that they are looking for experience with the Unreal Engine. It’s interesting to note that Nintendo has also recently started a new company with partner DeNA to produce more mobile games, while Netflix leans on external partners for its own mobile titles.
As always, I’ll be keeping an eye on this development and providing updates as they come. Stay tuned!
