A job advertisement for Head of Mobile, PlayStation Studios, SIE, reveals plans for the successful candidate to “focus on successfully adapting PlayStation’s most popular franchises for mobile”. “You will be responsible for building and scaling a team of mobile leaders and will serve as the Head of this new business unit within PlayStation Studios.” So, what should we expect? Well, PlayStation’s most popular franchises include Naughty Dog’s Uncharted and The Last of Us series, Polyphony’s Gran Turismo, Sony Santa Monica’s God of War, and Insomniac’s Ratchet & Clank. Perhaps we’ll see mobile iterations as a result of this new push. Don’t hold your breath, though. The job ad says a roadmap will need to be developed for a three to five year timeframe. Sony already has a mobile publishing label, called PlayStation Mobile, Inc., which has published the likes of the PlayStation app, the PS Remote Play app, endless-runner Run Sackboy! Run!, top-down puzzle game Uncharted: Fortune Hunter, AR app God of War | Mimir’s Vision, and a handful of PlayStation 4 PlayLink titles, such as Supermassive’s Hidden Agenda, and Flavourworks’ Erica. Interestingly, Sony has also used PlayStation Mobile, Inc. to publish PlayStation games on PC, such as Horizon, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, and the upcoming Days Gone. And who can forget the Xperia Play? This phone / handheld console hybrid produced by Sony Ericsson was once dubbed the “PlayStation Phone”, and launched in 2011 with 60 games, some of which were PlayStation classics. These included Cool Boarders 2, Destruction Derby, MediEvil and Syphon Filter. Mobile gaming is big business, of course. Pokémon Go, Candy Crush, PUBG, Genshin Impact and Roblox all pull in hundreds of millions of pounds a month. I imagine Sony fancies a piece of that lucrative pie. The news comes hot on the heels of a Bloomberg report that claims Sony has an “obsession with blockbusters” that was “stirring unrest” within PlayStation’s studios. As part of that report we discovered Naughty Dog is working on a The Last of Us remake and Sony Bend is working on a brand new game and not Days Gone 2.
