Is Sony working on a mobile controller?

Spoke in the middle of the year Sony at a strategy meeting still quite cryptic about the future of Playstation. It should be more “social”, bringing people together even more. One keyword came up more than once: mobile gaming. The company is already offering an anime IP such as “Fate / Grand Order” for mobile, which is distributed by Aniplex, a subsidiary of Sony.

The company wants to sell more anime games for mobile, said Kenichiro Yoshida, CEO of Sony, at the said meeting. And: “We will also concentrate on making the proprietary IP of PlayStation available on mobile devices.” In other words: The well-known and successful brands of the Playstation studios should also play a role in some form on mobile platforms in the future. This also fits in with Sony’s strategy of gradually releasing its blockbuster games for the PC. A little later, Playstation boss Jim Ryan spoke out in favor of it again and was a little more precise: he wanted them “Iconic IP” from Playstation also on mobile platforms see. An application to the Japanese patent office now shows that Playstation could support this mobile strategy with its own hardware.

One argument against gaming on smartphones is often the controls. Precise aiming or steering is hardly possible with a touchscreen, and the button layout on a screen is rarely intuitive. Sony seems to want to offer a solution for this. In one Patent describes the company a controllerthat can be used for playing games with smartphones. At first glance, it looks like a Nintendo Switch. But it is not a handheld of its own, the days of PSP and Vita are over, but two “grips” that can be connected to a smartphone.

“A left grip and a right grip that are gripped by the left and right hands of the user,” says the description. An accompanying illustration shows the controller, which surprisingly does not resemble the DualSense of the Playstation 5, but rather the DualShock of the Playstation 4. It is also interesting that the Playstation controller can actually be connected to a smartphone via Bluetooth and can therefore be used for gaming . So if Sony were to release a controller designed only for mobile gaming, it would make it clear that the company really sees part of the brand’s future in this market segment. Despite or maybe because of the great success that the Playstation 5 has enjoyed so far and that is making the company’s brands more and more well-known.

How exactly Sony’s strategy looks like is not yet known in detail. The focus could be on cloud gaming, which Microsoft is already pushing intensively. Then it would be possible to play Playstation blockbusters on the smartphone via streaming. It could just as well be that dedicated mobile games are developed with well-known Playstation characters. And porting of older games is not ruled out either – the computing power of smartphones is now strong enough to even get PS3 games to run.

That Nicola Sebastiani, the former content boss of Apple Arcade, meanwhile works for Playstation is another indication that Sony is looking to expand gaming on the go. Your own handhelds may never have had a real chance against the Nintendo hardware – with the smartphone, however, they could reach a market that is still dominated primarily by “Free 2 Play” games. Real blockbusters could fill a void.