Sony plans to release up to six video games for smartphones during the 2017 to 2018 financial year.
The titles will use some of the most popular gaming franchises on PlayStation such as golfing simulator Everybody’s Golf, PaRappa the Rapper and Arc The Lad.
The initial launch will be in Japan, with expansion to other Asian countries to follow.
According to Reuters, Sony revealed a total of 10 titles it was currently working on.
“With so many releases of smartphone games, it is becoming difficult to reach users,” explained Tomoki Kawaguchi, executive director at Sony’s mobile gaming studio ForwardWorks, according to the Financial Times.
He said: “But we can make full use of the intellectual property that we own, which is why we are rolling out smartphone games at this timing.”
ForwardWorks is the PlayStation subsidiary formed in April 2016 to bring Sony’s intellectual property in video games to the smartphone market.
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The news comes as Sony celebrates a bumper Black Friday week and total sales of 50 million units of the PlayStation 4 to consumers worldwide, as of 6 December 2016.
The company has also seen sales of software reach over 369.6 million copies as of 4 December 2016.
However, the success of Nintendo’s Pokemon Go, an augmented reality application for smartphone which became one of the most popular apps in history, has shown the potential of the app gaming market.
Nintendo’s share price rose hugely as the mass appeal of the game became apparent, more than doubling in less than three weeks.
There have also been examples such as King, a UK company best known for the addictive mobile phone games Candy Crush and Candy Crush Saga. King achieved the largest ever IPO for a mobile or social gaming company in the US and an analysis by the Guardian in February 2015 found that players spent £865m on in-app purchases in 2014.
https://www.cbronline.com/news/mobility/security/pokmon-go-what-are-the-big-app-lessons-for-business-4959378/
