PlayStation boss ‘very excited’ about upcoming mobile games

Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) has provided an update on the status of its mobile games division.

Over the past few years the company has successfully expanded its business to incorporate PC games, but its ambition to do likewise on mobile has yet to bear fruit in terms of actual product releases.

During that time, Sony has quietly been building a team of experienced mobile talent, hiring people from Apple, Kabam, Meta, Tencent, Super Evil Megacorp, Samsung, Niantic, Zynga, Riot and more.

And according to an active job listing, the company is looking to create a new platform focused on free-to-play mobile games.

However, last year its mobile division lost two top executives weeks apart – Michail Katkoff (who worked at Rovio and Zynga) and Nicola Sebastini (who previously led Apple Arcade).

PlayStation Studios boss Hermen Hulst, who will become joint CEO of SIE on June 1, discussed the company’s progress on the mobile games front during a business briefing on Thursday.

“On mobile, we have been hard at work on establishing a very strong, very seasoned core mobile team,” he said. “We are really excited to extend our experiences to new audiences in the mobile space as well.

“We’re taking a little bit more of a measured approach compared to the more aggressive approach that you’ve seen on PC. That is because PC is obviously more adjacent to the core of our development than mobile is.

“Nevertheless, we’re taking a strategic approach, also in the sense of working with some of the leading companies in this space.” Hulst continued.

“We’re working with various partners such as NCSoft and we’re learning a lot from these collaborations.

“And let me conclude by saying that we’re very excited about upcoming title releases that we can communicate in the future.”

Last November, SIE and NCSoft announced they’d signed a strategic partnership which would see them “collaborate in various global business fields, including mobile”.

The announcement came a year after it was reported that Sony and NCSoft had struck a deal to create a Horizon MMORPG.

Sony is currently “seeking an experienced software engineer to design PlayStation’s platform for developing, publishing, and operating free-to-play mobile games”, according to the aforementioned job listing.

Xbox plans to launch a web-based mobile game store in July in an attempt to compete with Apple’s App Store and the Google Play store.