PlayStation Mobile

» see playstation.com/psm as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

playstation mobile was sony's cross-platform mobile gaming attempt. the project was announced at sony developer events in 2011 as playstation suite, then rebranded playstation mobile by the time it actually shipped on october 3 2012. the pitch was a single store that worked on the ps vita alongside a cohort of android phones starting with the sony ericsson xperia play. htc, asus, fujitsu, and sharp later joined the certified-device list under the playstation certified program. developers wrote in a c# subset against a runtime sony shipped called psm sdk.

i missed playstation mobile. by 2012 i was deep in computer-vision work on the engineering side and not paying attention to mobile gaming as a category at all. the xperia play, the dedicated slide-out-keypad android phone the platform was meant to anchor, never really reached turkey at meaningful scale. it shipped in early 2011, got mediocre reviews on the android side, and the carriers that would have subsidized it here did not pick it up. by the time playstation mobile actually launched, the device half of the strategy had already cooled off.

the vita side of the bet was the other half. sony shipped the ps vita in december 2011 to enthusiastic launch reviews and immediately watched the install base stall out under nintendo 3ds pricing pressure. playstation mobile was supposed to be the indie pipeline that filled the vita's release calendar between aaa titles. about 683 games eventually shipped through the store. there was no clear breakout title. the sales numbers sony never disclosed.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was technically ~

the psm sdk targeted a managed runtime based on mono, with c# as the development language and a custom api on top. this was unusual for a console-adjacent platform, where c plus plus and proprietary toolchains were the norm. developers liked it. the toolchain was free, the certification process was lighter than the playstation network's standard process, and the device targets were diverse enough that you could ship to vita and ps tv plus the certified android phones from one codebase.

the device-certification side was the weak link. sony's playstation certified program for android required hardware partners to ship phones with a specific dpad-and-button layout plus a performance floor that included the bundled playstation mobile client. only a handful of devices ever qualified. the xperia play was the flagship, but htc one s and a few asus and fujitsu models also made the list. consumers were not buying android phones based on a playstation logo on the back, and the program never built mass.

~ what really happened ~

sony announced the wind-down on march 12 2015 through the official playstation blog. the storefront stopped accepting new game submissions earlier that year. existing customers had until july 15 2015 to purchase content from the store. full service ended september 10 2015, after which previously purchased games could no longer be re-downloaded for new device installs but would continue to run on existing devices that had cached them.

the official statement was diplomatic. sony cited a lack of "platform suitability" for continued investment. the unstated reading was that the vita install base was too small and the android side of the bet had already collapsed. the entire 683-game catalog became inaccessible through normal purchasing channels after the september 2015 cutoff. a small archivist community has since worked on preservation of the binaries.

~ what replaced it ~

playstation mobile sits in the part of sony history where the company tried to be everywhere at once. the vita itself eventually died in march 2019 while the xperia play line went dormant after one generation. the cross-platform-store ambition that powered playstation mobile reappears every few years in a different shape, most recently as the playstation-on-pc push around god of war and horizon ports.

the people who actually shipped on playstation mobile mostly remember it fondly. the sdk worked and the certification process was reasonable by sony standards. the audience just never showed up. it is filed in mobile-gaming history as a clean execution of a strategy that did not survive contact with the actual market, which is a thing that happens to sony every other console generation.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »