Sony aims to reach billion people with PlayStation mobile games and subscriptions
Sony will deploy its PlayStation titles in the mobile games market and focus more on subscriptions such as PlayStation Plus. With this, the company wants to reach more people directly. Now the company reaches 160 million people, that should be a billion.
Sony wants to accelerate its investments in mobile games and online services to reach more people. The company gave some details about that in its annual strategy meeting. There are now 47.6 million PlayStation Plus subscribers. This is Sony’s largest community and therefore the most important service in the range, says the company itself.
Sony’s goal is to expand this community. This should be done, among other things, by releasing exclusive games, by strengthening relationships with developers and investing in the development of their own games.
The aim to reach one billion consumers directly must be achieved in the next three years. It is one of the parts of a multi-year plan, in which Sony will invest 15 billion euros over the next three years, CNBC writes.
Mobile PlayStation games
To reach more people, Sony wants to bring its PlayStation franchises to smartphones. The company says it has a large catalog of first-party titles that can be translated into smartphone gaming. However, Sony does not give concrete details. “We are exploring the mobile market with some great PlayStation franchises,” the presentation reads.
Sony has been working on mobile games for some time and has already released a successful title in Japan with Fate/Grand Order. That free-to-play game is based on an anime series and was released in 2015. By the end of 2019, the game had grossed $4 billion in sales. Sony has not yet had such success with mobile games based on PlayStation titles.
The fact that Sony wants to focus strongly on mobile PlayStation games was recently shown by a vacancy in which Sony was looking for a Head of Mobile for its PlayStation Studios. In its strategic documents, the company now confirms its emphasis on developing more smartphone games.
14.8 million PlayStation 5 consoles
In the fiscal year that started on April 1, Sony expects to ship 14.8 million PlayStation 5 consoles. This would bring the total number since its release to 22.6 million copies. That’s slightly higher than the 22.5 million PlayStation 4 consoles shipped in the same period after release.
The number of consoles that Sony can supply is limited by the chip shortages. Earlier this month, Sony indicated that it expects the PlayStation 5 to be poorly available in both 2021 and 2022. Even if chip shortages diminish, Sony expects it to be difficult to catch up with demand.
PlayStation partners with Sony AI
Sony also announced that the Sony AI business unit, founded last year, has partnered with PlayStation to “make gaming experiences even richer and more fun.” Reinforcement learning is used to make characters in games smarter. This concerns both virtual opponents and virtual fellow players.