5 ms·

Sony is ready to admit that mobile gaming is too big to ignore

49 points by isaacfrond 4y ago

tus666 4y ago
Title should really say mobile phone gaming.
- frosted-flakes 4y ago
  I would say that there are 4 categories of games, with some overlap: PC, console, portable, and mobile. The title is unambiguous in my opinion.
ThatPlayer 4y ago
Sony isn't new to mobile gaming. They publish Fate/Grand Order, easily one of the top 10 grossing mobile games.
- fomine3 4y ago
  It's by subsidiary of SME (Aniplex). Actually they have some experiene for mobile games (primary in Japan) but it's not SIE (now HQ'd in the US). OP title should say SIE rather than Sony.
noobermin 4y ago
Why can't a company just do what makes them money already? Why do they have to "admit" that X is "too big to ignore"? Like Nintendo's doomed forray into mobile (super mario run, animal crossing pocketcamp) came to be pale in comparison to the money they'd make on the switch which is just a return to their bread and butter (albeit with a physically mobile twist), I wonder how much of the "pivots" are driven by over eager MBA new grads who are just chasing headlines from equally delusional gaming media writers, and these two classes somehow feedback into each other, leading to ill ventures by companies that waste money and time eventually.
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  They are. But their job is to make as much money as they can, not to be content with the amount they’re making now.
- hnuser52395 4y ago
  Because otherwise, you end up like Dropbox. You may be the market leader right now, but competitors will catch up (Google Drive and OneDrive in this case), and your core business will be obsolete or less valuable. You would have wished you spent the resources expanding into other areas (which is what Google is doing right now by investing outside of search). For example, Kodak already faced bankruptcy as a photographic film company. They smartly moved to pharmaceutical manufacturing. If mobile gaming and/or AR/VR became so big by now that no one uses dedicated handhelds, Nintendo would have lost out on a lot of money. That didn't end up to be the case, but no one knew that at the time.
  - noobermin 4y ago
    Look, it makes sense to diversify that's fine. That isn't what I'm poo-pooing at all. It's fine to spend some of your time and money on random side projects. The problem is priorities. Anyhow, if it helps, the problem I'm really ranting about isn't the move to mobile but the latter part of the comment, which is the chasing of hype. People are so intoxicated with free market ideology that they really believe every move a company makes is really some invisible hand wisdom and they forget businesses are groups of people, that is human people. They underestimate how many moves are really just what I said, some people in management chasing hype. And chasing hype or better diversifying is fine and wise, it just needs to be done within scale to the threat currently faced and the resources at hand. Dropbox is a one-trick pony so they are right to be worried. Sony is literally one of the biggest most diversified technology companies in the world. It probably is wise to have some presence in mobile if they really have none (although I doubt the article), but if you just read gaming media like the OP you think it some crime or deadly threat to Sony for it not to be a leading mobile IP owner yesterday. It's just the language is out of scale of the actual risk to Sony, and language of a media piece might not matter, you bet your socks some 24 year old fresh MBA somewhere in Sony USA is going to read this then start flinging slide decks to management about how they need to start dropping half a million on some mobile start up that is barely alive or something.
bogwog 4y ago
Sony had one of the best selling handhelds of all time with the PSP, and then they abandoned its successor (the Vita) almost immediately after launching it because they were scared of mobile gaming. They even hedged their bets by releasing the Xperia Play around the same time, which was a hybrid handheld/Android phone. They abandoned that too very quickly. So logically, in order to avoid throwing money away by creating niche handheld devices that nobody will buy they...make extremely niche and expensive handhelds that nobody buys (https://electronics.sony.com/c/mobile https://electronics.sony.com/c/mobile)
- speeder 4y ago
  I miss the Xperia Play, it is best phone I ever had, I only stopped using it because the GPU broke :( All newer Android phones disappointed me, specially with everything glued, the Xperia Play was possible to disassemble and service myself (and the battery was super easy to change). Also many games were awesome on it. What baffles me is that Sony abandoned it right off the bat, for example my Xperia Play was imported from Italy, it couldn't download the official Wipeout version for it, because that was only available in Japan for some reason, and Sony never bothering even releasing their first party titles outside of Japan, I find that mind boggling. Also never got a single update for the OS.
  - Cyph0n 4y ago
    Xperia Play was a magical device. I played so many emulated retro games on mine! Good times.
  - vel0city 4y ago
    And now that many metros have near gigabit low-ish latency 5G networks, you don't even need to have a lot of games running locally. You could just stream games from the cloud our your console/PC at home if you're on the go. Having a phone that can easily be a game pad is such a fun concept. I often get <25ms pings on OpenVPN to devices at my home when I'm out and about on my 5G phone. That's enough for a lot of games to be streamed.
    - 4y ago
wkdneidbwf 4y ago
it’s so weird to me that mobile gaming is so big while the games are by and large complete and utter garbage. is it the micro-transaction, loot box, gambling-lite style that sucks susceptible people in and milks them?
- zibby8 4y ago
  People just want something mindless to pass the time. If it also triggers the gambling dopamine response, all the better.
- bmitc 4y ago
  I don't think I've ever even played a game on my phone except for playing Pokemon Go long enough to "catch" the first pokemon and then put it away. Mobile games are good for nothing except wasting people's time and brain energy and getting people addicted to microtransactions. Microtransactions have got to regulated away, because they're destroying people's attention spans. We waged wars against drugs and profanity in music, but yet because microtransactions makes people a shit ton of "clean" money, they're allowed. Microtransactions are incredibly addicting, and research shows that this type of gaming is harmful to the brain.
  - jquery 4y ago
    I’ve spent more than I’m willing to admit on Clash Royale back when it launched. I was in a bad place mentally to resist the lootbox dopamine cycle and I’m lucky it didn’t damage me financially. Now I don’t touch micro transactions which means most mobile games are off limits. Apple Arcade has some decent mobile games because it doesn’t allow micro transactions.
    - bmitc 4y ago
      The GUI space is one of those areas that Microsoft has done pretty poorly on, in my opinion. What they've created is so convoluted. They have Windows Forms, WPF, UWP, WinUI, .NET MAUI, and Xamarin Forms, and then there's third party toolkits like Uno Platform and Avalonia. It's all over the place, and it's somewhat frustrating, because I think Microsoft is poised to be one of the only companies that has the ability to "solve" cross-platform GUI development.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
causality0 4y ago
Mobile games are so terrible I don't even bother shopping for them anymore. Now that phones are powerful enough to emulate the PS2 and Switch I can spend the rest of my life playing games that were designed as games.
- wodenokoto 4y ago
  I think monument valley, Prune and Mario Run were great games. It’s a shame people were so against Mario Runs monetization model. I thought it was very fair. First world free as a demo, the rest of the game for a one time payment. Apparently mobile gamers wanted it to be free to play/ pay to win.
  - schroeding 4y ago
    + "Part Time UFO", another great mobile game (without micro transactions or ads at all) by HAL, the makers of the Kirby games. Costs less than 5 bucks, a fair price IMO.
    - hulitu 4y ago
      From the movie on Google Play i see that you only need to lift some stuff. A bit expensive for 5 bucks.
VyseofArcadia 4y ago
When I first bought a smartphone, I made up all sorts of reasons why I wanted one, but the real reason was that I wanted to experience this new gaming form-factor. Surely there would be new, innovative, and exciting games to be played with swipes and taps and a little gyro. I haven't opened a mobile game in years. I'm sure there are good ones out there but: 1) you have to wade through so much crap. 2) every game I've tried has just sucked down battery, and I need power to do phone stuff. 3) I never found a game that had the sort of progression I enjoy from console and PC games. Everything is designed to be played in 5-minute bursts. Sometimes I really want to just sink my teeth into a game, and it seems the only way to do that is play ports or emulated versions of console games. 4) I had trouble finding games that really took advantage of the form factor. So many games are in the style of console or PC games, but in some way compromised to fit on a phone, be it an on-screen controller, watered-down gameplay, etc. I know there will be rebuttals to points 2-4, but to that I say, see point 1. At some point it wasn't worth wading through the games I didn't enjoy to find one that I might.
- Ancalagon 4y ago
  I wholly agree with your point 3. Mobile isn't a "classic" gaming experience imho because the games are designed to be played as distractions for a few minutes, then put away. Its the same experience on tablets too, really any app store games are just not an in-depth fun experience.
stuckinhell 4y ago
There is a lot of consolidation going on the big gaming companies. There needs to be some monopoly busting, or we'll be doomed to replay the same games every year for $70-100.
FunnyBadger 4y ago
Japanese businesses often are like this. Every major decision requires 100% consensus and agreement before it is accepted and things move on with the full force of the organization. One person disagreeing can hold things up and especially if it's a senior member of the team. I worked with a Japanese division of Hewlett-Packard and it was just like this. But sometimes sillier/stupider.

49 points by isaacfrond 4y ago

tus666 4y ago

Title should really say mobile phone gaming.

frosted-flakes 4y ago
I would say that there are 4 categories of games, with some overlap: PC, console, portable, and mobile. The title is unambiguous in my opinion.

ThatPlayer 4y ago

Sony isn't new to mobile gaming. They publish Fate/Grand Order, easily one of the top 10 grossing mobile games.

fomine3 4y ago
It's by subsidiary of SME (Aniplex). Actually they have some experiene for mobile games (primary in Japan) but it's not SIE (now HQ'd in the US). OP title should say SIE rather than Sony.

noobermin 4y ago

Why can't a company just do what makes them money already? Why do they have to "admit" that X is "too big to ignore"? Like Nintendo's doomed forray into mobile (super mario run, animal crossing pocketcamp) came to be pale in comparison to the money they'd make on the switch which is just a return to their bread and butter (albeit with a physically mobile twist), I wonder how much of the "pivots" are driven by over eager MBA new grads who are just chasing headlines from equally delusional gaming media writers, and these two classes somehow feedback into each other, leading to ill ventures by companies that waste money and time eventually.

colinmhayes 4y ago
They are. But their job is to make as much money as they can, not to be content with the amount they’re making now.
hnuser52395 4y ago
Because otherwise, you end up like Dropbox. You may be the market leader right now, but competitors will catch up (Google Drive and OneDrive in this case), and your core business will be obsolete or less valuable. You would have wished you spent the resources expanding into other areas (which is what Google is doing right now by investing outside of search). For example, Kodak already faced bankruptcy as a photographic film company. They smartly moved to pharmaceutical manufacturing. If mobile gaming and/or AR/VR became so big by now that no one uses dedicated handhelds, Nintendo would have lost out on a lot of money. That didn't end up to be the case, but no one knew that at the time.
- noobermin 4y ago
  Look, it makes sense to diversify that's fine. That isn't what I'm poo-pooing at all. It's fine to spend some of your time and money on random side projects. The problem is priorities. Anyhow, if it helps, the problem I'm really ranting about isn't the move to mobile but the latter part of the comment, which is the chasing of hype. People are so intoxicated with free market ideology that they really believe every move a company makes is really some invisible hand wisdom and they forget businesses are groups of people, that is human people. They underestimate how many moves are really just what I said, some people in management chasing hype. And chasing hype or better diversifying is fine and wise, it just needs to be done within scale to the threat currently faced and the resources at hand. Dropbox is a one-trick pony so they are right to be worried. Sony is literally one of the biggest most diversified technology companies in the world. It probably is wise to have some presence in mobile if they really have none (although I doubt the article), but if you just read gaming media like the OP you think it some crime or deadly threat to Sony for it not to be a leading mobile IP owner yesterday. It's just the language is out of scale of the actual risk to Sony, and language of a media piece might not matter, you bet your socks some 24 year old fresh MBA somewhere in Sony USA is going to read this then start flinging slide decks to management about how they need to start dropping half a million on some mobile start up that is barely alive or something.

bogwog 4y ago

Sony had one of the best selling handhelds of all time with the PSP, and then they abandoned its successor (the Vita) almost immediately after launching it because they were scared of mobile gaming. They even hedged their bets by releasing the Xperia Play around the same time, which was a hybrid handheld/Android phone. They abandoned that too very quickly. So logically, in order to avoid throwing money away by creating niche handheld devices that nobody will buy they...make extremely niche and expensive handhelds that nobody buys (https://electronics.sony.com/c/mobile https://electronics.sony.com/c/mobile)

speeder 4y ago
I miss the Xperia Play, it is best phone I ever had, I only stopped using it because the GPU broke :( All newer Android phones disappointed me, specially with everything glued, the Xperia Play was possible to disassemble and service myself (and the battery was super easy to change). Also many games were awesome on it. What baffles me is that Sony abandoned it right off the bat, for example my Xperia Play was imported from Italy, it couldn't download the official Wipeout version for it, because that was only available in Japan for some reason, and Sony never bothering even releasing their first party titles outside of Japan, I find that mind boggling. Also never got a single update for the OS.
- Cyph0n 4y ago
  Xperia Play was a magical device. I played so many emulated retro games on mine! Good times.
- vel0city 4y ago
  And now that many metros have near gigabit low-ish latency 5G networks, you don't even need to have a lot of games running locally. You could just stream games from the cloud our your console/PC at home if you're on the go. Having a phone that can easily be a game pad is such a fun concept. I often get <25ms pings on OpenVPN to devices at my home when I'm out and about on my 5G phone. That's enough for a lot of games to be streamed.
  - 4y ago

wkdneidbwf 4y ago

it’s so weird to me that mobile gaming is so big while the games are by and large complete and utter garbage. is it the micro-transaction, loot box, gambling-lite style that sucks susceptible people in and milks them?

zibby8 4y ago
People just want something mindless to pass the time. If it also triggers the gambling dopamine response, all the better.
bmitc 4y ago
I don't think I've ever even played a game on my phone except for playing Pokemon Go long enough to "catch" the first pokemon and then put it away. Mobile games are good for nothing except wasting people's time and brain energy and getting people addicted to microtransactions. Microtransactions have got to regulated away, because they're destroying people's attention spans. We waged wars against drugs and profanity in music, but yet because microtransactions makes people a shit ton of "clean" money, they're allowed. Microtransactions are incredibly addicting, and research shows that this type of gaming is harmful to the brain.
- jquery 4y ago
  I’ve spent more than I’m willing to admit on Clash Royale back when it launched. I was in a bad place mentally to resist the lootbox dopamine cycle and I’m lucky it didn’t damage me financially. Now I don’t touch micro transactions which means most mobile games are off limits. Apple Arcade has some decent mobile games because it doesn’t allow micro transactions.
  - bmitc 4y ago
    The GUI space is one of those areas that Microsoft has done pretty poorly on, in my opinion. What they've created is so convoluted. They have Windows Forms, WPF, UWP, WinUI, .NET MAUI, and Xamarin Forms, and then there's third party toolkits like Uno Platform and Avalonia. It's all over the place, and it's somewhat frustrating, because I think Microsoft is poised to be one of the only companies that has the ability to "solve" cross-platform GUI development.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

causality0 4y ago

Mobile games are so terrible I don't even bother shopping for them anymore. Now that phones are powerful enough to emulate the PS2 and Switch I can spend the rest of my life playing games that were designed as games.

wodenokoto 4y ago
I think monument valley, Prune and Mario Run were great games. It’s a shame people were so against Mario Runs monetization model. I thought it was very fair. First world free as a demo, the rest of the game for a one time payment. Apparently mobile gamers wanted it to be free to play/ pay to win.
- schroeding 4y ago
  + "Part Time UFO", another great mobile game (without micro transactions or ads at all) by HAL, the makers of the Kirby games. Costs less than 5 bucks, a fair price IMO.
  - hulitu 4y ago
    From the movie on Google Play i see that you only need to lift some stuff. A bit expensive for 5 bucks.

VyseofArcadia 4y ago

When I first bought a smartphone, I made up all sorts of reasons why I wanted one, but the real reason was that I wanted to experience this new gaming form-factor. Surely there would be new, innovative, and exciting games to be played with swipes and taps and a little gyro. I haven't opened a mobile game in years. I'm sure there are good ones out there but: 1) you have to wade through so much crap. 2) every game I've tried has just sucked down battery, and I need power to do phone stuff. 3) I never found a game that had the sort of progression I enjoy from console and PC games. Everything is designed to be played in 5-minute bursts. Sometimes I really want to just sink my teeth into a game, and it seems the only way to do that is play ports or emulated versions of console games. 4) I had trouble finding games that really took advantage of the form factor. So many games are in the style of console or PC games, but in some way compromised to fit on a phone, be it an on-screen controller, watered-down gameplay, etc. I know there will be rebuttals to points 2-4, but to that I say, see point 1. At some point it wasn't worth wading through the games I didn't enjoy to find one that I might.

Ancalagon 4y ago
I wholly agree with your point 3. Mobile isn't a "classic" gaming experience imho because the games are designed to be played as distractions for a few minutes, then put away. Its the same experience on tablets too, really any app store games are just not an in-depth fun experience.

stuckinhell 4y ago

There is a lot of consolidation going on the big gaming companies. There needs to be some monopoly busting, or we'll be doomed to replay the same games every year for $70-100.

FunnyBadger 4y ago

Japanese businesses often are like this. Every major decision requires 100% consensus and agreement before it is accepted and things move on with the full force of the organization. One person disagreeing can hold things up and especially if it's a senior member of the team. I worked with a Japanese division of Hewlett-Packard and it was just like this. But sometimes sillier/stupider.