Sony wants 20 per cent of new games to be on smartphones by 2025, and last August it announced a new PlayStation Studios mobile division to help make that happen. But you should know that what Sony is building No It won’t look like a new game studio producing its own games nor, shall we say, a way to transfer Sony’s biggest games to phones the same way they transfer to PC.
17 current and past job postings suggest that PlayStation Studios Mobile is more of a cross-functional management, strategy, licensing and support team.
They figure out what PlayStation IP would best fit on a mobile phone, they help dole out that licensed IP to internal users. and external game studios alike, overseeing titles, making sure final games live up to Sony’s expectations, and perhaps investing in or even acquiring third-party developers if there’s strategic value to it.
This is the description of a Senior Third Party Producer role, for example:
Be an ambassador for PlayStation, collaborating with the best mobile game developers to test, produce and launch PlayStation Studios Mobile games to the highest level of quality, on time and on budget.
And many roles ask prospective employees to have a “proven track record” specifically with free games. I’ve only seen a game designer role so far, and his main responsibility is: “Support game design for internal projects and provide advice for projects with external partners on F2P mobile systems, economic management and retention features.”
Tried and true, at least for the console
Leaning on outside studios wouldn’t be surprising: it’s a formula that has worked for Sony in the past. Many praised the first match and Third-party games have come out of Sony’s PlayStation Studios (formerly Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios), even if Sony briefly tried to pretend that the brand was solely about its own proprietary exclusives when the PS5 first launched.
Also, this is the third time Sony has tried to get smartphone gaming off the ground, following its failed PlayStation Mobile platform and its WayForward studio that only produced two games (everyone’s golf and Disgaea RPG) specifically for the Japanese market. (Sony was also preparing to bring its PlayStation Now cloud gaming service to phones, I found out in 2021, but let’s not count it because Sony never announced it.)
Some of the posts describe the group as a “small but fast-growing team” where employees will “wear many hats and contribute to the nascent culture for mobile game design at PlayStation Studios while championing efforts across the company.”
The job postings make it sound like there’s real interest in leveraging Sony’s internal studios to produce the games as well, should those efforts be successfully defended. The company’s head of mobile products describes his work as including internally and externally developed titles:
Responsible for the delivery of PlayStation Studios’ quality mobile titles, including those developed in-house within existing studios and acquired and developed externally through licensing, co-development, and co-publishing partnerships.
Most of the current roles are for product managers and outside producers in San Mateo and Amsterdam; the company is also hiring a Mobile Engineering Director and a product strategy analyst. Previously, Sony also searched a finance managerdirectors mobile product management, business development and studio operationsand a korean translator in Amsterdam.
According to their LinkedIn pages, Sony’s hires currently appear to include:
- Nicola Sebastiani as head of mobile; previously head of content for Apple Arcade
- Olivier Courtemanche as mobile product manager; previously he was director of product at Zynga and briefly head of content at Meta’s Horizon. Surprisingly, Sony seems to have built the role specifically for him:
- Kris Davis as Head of Mobile Business Development; he spent seven years doing that job for Kabam
- Uyen Uyen Ton Nu as head of mobile marketing; he spent eight years doing that for Super Evil Megacorp (that studio, by the way, is working on a project for Netflix’s line of mobile games)
- Justin Kubiak in licensing; was vice president of mobile publishing at NCSoft and previously head of gaming partnerships for Samsung
We’re definitely looking forward to seeing what they come up with. Sony previously said that Savage Game Studios, the first group PlayStation acquired to produce mobile games, already has “a new unannounced AAA mobile live service action game” in the works. His job postings show that they are looking for experience with Unreal Engine.
Nintendo also recently created a new company with its partner DeNA (co-developer of Super Mario Run, fire emblem heroes, etc.) to potentially produce more mobile games. And like Sony, Netflix also relies on third-party partners for its own mobile titles, though it’s also taken Apple Arcade’s strategy of bundling games you previously had to buy into your paid subscription.
