Sony smartphone games will be released in Japan in 2018

ForwardWorks, the company that Sony founded to make smartphone games from PlayStation titles, will release five games in 2018. It is not yet known which titles it concerns and the games will only be released in Asia for the time being.

Sony founded ForwardWorks in March and now the company has announced when the first games will be released, the Wall Street Journal reports. It would be five games for the Japanese market, which will later be released in other Asian countries. The smartphone games, of which no specific details are known yet, should be released before March 2018. Sony does not currently have plans to bring the games to other parts of the world, a Sony spokesperson told WSJ.

ForwardWorks previously announced that it would use the intellectual property of PlayStation titles for its mobile games. Game characters from existing games will also return in the apps. Sony stated that the goal is to make “full-fledged” games.

Competitor Nintendo is also going to release games for smartphones, but that will already happen this year. Super Mario Run will be released on iOS in December. Later that game will also come to Android. Sony made efforts to gain traction in the smartphone game market years ago. In 2011, the company released a PlayStation smartphone: the Xperia Play. A successor to that device has never appeared. In addition, there was the PlayStation Mobile platform and an Android app, which worked on a selected number of phones, with which, in particular, indie games could be played. However, that service was closed in 2015 and the app also disappeared.