Last August, Sony announced the creation of a new division, PlayStation Studios Mobile. The company plans to release 20% of new games for smartphones by 2025. However, the new Sony division does not look like a game studio that will release its own games or a team capable of porting Sony games to phones. Active and already closed vacancies suggest that Studios Mobile is more like a management, strategy, licensing and support department.
The task of the mobile division is to find out which intellectual property of PlayStation is best suited for mobile platforms and will facilitate the transfer of the necessary materials to internal or external game studios. PlayStation Studios Mobile is designed to control branding, ensure that games meet Sony’s expectations, and invest in and even buy third-party developers if needed.
The role of Senior External Producer is described in the job posting as follows:
“Become a PlayStation ambassador by working with leading mobile game developers to evaluate, produce and deliver PlayStation Studios mobile games to the highest quality, on time and on budget.”
Among the vacancies, there is only one position of game designer – he helps the team to interact with developers. Most ads require employees to have a proven track record of working with free games. Most of the positions are product managers and producers. The company is also hiring a director of mobile development and a product strategy analyst. Previously, Sony was looking for a finance manager, directors of mobile product management, business development and operations, and a Korean translator.
The job descriptions give the impression of Sony’s strong interest in bringing in-house studios into mobile game development. This is given no less attention than the search for external developers.
Sony is trying to enter the smartphone games market for the third time. Earlier, the PlayStation Mobile platform failed, with only two games released on the Japanese market: Everyone’s Golf and Disgaea RPG. There was also an officially unconfirmed attempt to transfer the PlayStation Now cloud gaming service to smartphones.
Sony was going to launch a mobile version of PlayStation Now in 2017 – long before Apple Arcade
Source: The Verge
