Sony wants to use Android & iOS to expand its PlayStation empire

Ben Schoon | May 26 2022 - 9:31 am PT

Sony isn’t the first name you think of when it comes to mobile games, but the company has brought some of its PlayStation IP to Android and iOS in the past. This week, Sony confirmed much bigger plans for mobile.

Announced during its annual investor day, Sony revealed plans to boost its share of the gaming market outside of just PlayStation consoles (via Video Game Chronicles). By 2025, Sony wants roughly half of its new releases to be hitting PC and mobile devices.

Sony has seen quite a bit of success in expanding its games to PC, with ports of Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War, and Days Gone generating around $80 million in sales in 2021. Sony believes that PC games will generate up to $300 million this year. Last July, Sony doubled down on this goal by adding a PC porting developer to its PlayStation Studios.

But on the mobile side of things, Sony seems to have big plans. By 2025, the company estimates that mobile releases on Android and iOS will make up for around 20% of new original releases based on PlayStation IP. On Android, Sony already has a runner based on its Sackboy franchise, a God of War spinoff, and a few other apps. Leading up these efforts, presumably, would be Nicola Sebastiani, a former lead on Apple Arcade who was the first of multiple hires regarding mobile development.

Speaking to Video Game Chronicles, Sony Interactive Entertainment President Jim Ryan said that these expansions to PC and mobile would expand PlayStation’s gaming efforts from a “very narrow segment” to “being present pretty much everywhere.”

What might these new mobile games look like? Sony says that plans for mobile game releases from PlayStation Studios may include co-developing games with existing mobile game developers, as well as establishing its own studios. The latter would follow a route similar to Nintendo, which debuted several mobile games natively on Android and iOS. In 2021, Sony said that it would bring “some iconic PlayStation IP” to mobile, but nothing major has come from that announcement just yet. Sony’s God of War game was released in 2018 while the Sackboy title arrived all the way back in 2015.

It’s unclear at this point if Sony also plans to expand its cloud gaming efforts to mobile devices as well. The main rival of PlayStation, Xbox, has been delivering full console titles to mobile gamers for almost two years now through Xbox Game Pass. Sony does have its own cloud gaming service, formally known as PlayStation Now, but the service has never been available to mobile players. Instead, only streaming games from a console on a local network has been available for a few years.