Raise your hand if you remember the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play smartphone. Now raise your hand if you remember Playstation Mobile. For those that forgot about either or both, the Xperia Play was the half-hearted attempt at a "Playstation phone" that was mired in internal politics, while Playstation Mobile was Sony's attempt at pushing the idea of mobile gaming by featuring a curated list of ported PS1 games and original indie games that would work acrtoss Android devices as long as the devices were "Playstation Certified" in 2012, around the initial release of the Vita.
While the idea was sound for the early era of Android gaming and the program had the early support of Android manufacturers in HTC, in practice the program was a confused mess, with games being promised but never released, other games being released but never promoted and the hardware certification process being anything but straightforward. The only devices that were approved outside of now discontinued HTC smartphones were Sony Ericsson's own Xperia smartphones and to add insult to injury, the Xperia Play was discontinued after less than a year because of its own issues with subsequent Android updates breaking hardware controller functionality on the device and rendering the controls useless.
While the program has been running quietly in the background, Sony has decided to abandon the platform as developers never showed much interest in Playstation Mobile, instead focusing solely on the Vita. Sony is ensuring future access to games purchased via Playstation Mobile for those certified devices that stay at or below Android 4.4.2, but any future updates will not be certified for the program, meaning that those that update their devices to newer Android versions aren't guaranteed access to Playstation Mobile without issues and even later versions will not allow access at all.
Did you ever use Playstation Mobile on the Vita or on an Android smartphone? If you did what did you think?
via VentureBeat, The Verge
Humberto Saabedra is the Owner of AnimeNews.biz, Editor-in-Chief of PhoneNews.com and a part-time recording engineer. He can also be found musing on things (and Nico Robin) at @AnimeNewsdotbiz
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