Sony Is Bringing PlayStation Games To iOS and Android Devices (gizmodo.com)

An anonymous reader points us to Bryan Lufkin's report on Gizmodo: A year ago, Nintendo announced its long-overdue plans to bring its games to smartphones. Now, Sony's doing the same thing. You'll soon be able to play original Sony games on your iOS or Android device, the company announced today. Sony is setting up a new business division called ForwardWorks, which will focus on mobile services, bringing 'full-fledged game titles' and Sony's PlayStation characters and intellectual property to handheld smart devices. And it could be happening pretty soon -- the press release says ForwardWorks kicks off operations next month.

Comments

Let's hope it's related to their original effort

[drinkypoo]

Sony originally did this on the Xperia Play, a little-known gaming smartphone possibly inspired by the Nokia N-Gage. Where other phones might have a sliding keyboard, it has a sliding gamepad with two touch-sensitive circles standing in for analog sticks. A small number of games were released for the Xplay, at a few bucks a piece. All of them run on the same emulator, and simply consist of CD images bundled up with it. A tool PSXperia lets you convert your own titles, and the vast majority of games do work with some notably unfortunate exceptions like Wipeout XL. (That's almost as sad as Forgotten Worlds not playing on the Sega Nomad... but uh, I digress.)

Hopefully, they are continuing the strategy of using a general emulator, and even more hopefully, it will be readily hacked to accept other game images... and have link play. Or at least, that they will sell WOXL. Because let's face it, what is really wanted is being able to play WOXL over the internet...

Vita?

[Vyse of Arcadia]

Gee, Sony, thanks for abandoning the Vita in favor of this shit. I love playing games designed for buttons on a touchscreen.

No

[HalAtWork]

They're not putting PlayStation or Nintendo games on these platforms. They're making entirely new games based on existing characters optimized for the platform. You won't be playing Super Mario Bros or Uncharted on your phone.

Re:Let's hope it's related to their original effor

[drinkypoo]

Emulation is not necessary for Sony original titles - they have the source code, they can do a port.

A port from the PS1 is relatively trivial. By now they can probably do that in their sleep. Yet, they did not when, for example, they wanted to bring these games to the Xperia Play. Why not? Because if the game is not frame-by-frame identical to the original, gamers will shit themselves. A port from the PS2 or PS3 is far from trivial. The consoles have deeply weird hardware for which dramatic optimization had to be done, and big portions of the code has to be ripped out and replaced with something substantially different. Making the game behave properly, as gamers expect, becomes dramatically difficult under these circumstances.

None of this actually precludes them from porting classic titles to Android, because Sony has certainly made stupid decisions in the past, but I really don't see it. It seems more likely that they've dusted off their old Android PSX emulator code from the Xplay, revised it to use Android controller input, and probably added some awful touch controls. It would cost them basically nothing, since it was a complete working product already.