Sony Want A Piece Of The Pokemon GO Mobile Pie

Sony’s Chief Executive Kaz Harai has gone on the record stating that Sony will “aggressively get into” mobile gaming following the success of Pokemon GO.

“It’s quite a shift from being just a console-based business to being on mobile phones as well,” Harai said at the IFA consumer electronics expo in Berlin

Sony have achieved varied success in the handheld space to date, launching the PSP 12 years ago and more recently the Vita, which both had mild sucess but nowhere near the likes of the Nintendo 3DS or Sony’s home consoles.. They’ve also had a number of mobile games released to support console titles, such as Run Sackboy Run and the more recent Uncharted: Fortune Hunter.
The strategy behind these games have obviously been mainly as a marketing tool to sell more console iterations, rather than being fully-fledged individual experiences that are going to bring in significant amounts of money.

The real issue for Sony obviously being that they don’t have too many household names that would pull at the nostalgic heart-strings like Pokemon did. Their biggest franchises being Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon which they don’t own.

Thanks, Financial Times.