Sony Computer Entertainment Inc (soon to be Sony Interactive Entertainment) has announced the creation of ForwardWorks Corp, a new company whose purpose will be to develop PlayStation titles for iOS and Android.

In a press release, Sony said that ForwardWorks will be leveraging existing PlayStation game IPs and characters to create “full-fledged game titles in the new filed [sic] of the smart device market.”

Sony’s announcement was not exactly written in the best English, so it is a bit difficult to parse what sort of games ForwardWorks will be creating. More than likely, the company will be creating new mobile-only titles using existing PlayStation IPs, but there is also the possibility that ForwardWorks could be porting older PlayStation and PlayStation Portable titles for mobile platforms.

There are already a number of original PlayStation era games that have successfully been ported to mobile, including several of the Final Fantasy games from the mid to late 1990s.

Competing with Nintendo?

PlayStation is not the first Japanese game company to finally hop onto the mobile gaming bandwagon.

This year, Nintendo Co Ltd has also joined the smartphone revolution, and its first mobile “game,” Miitomo, was released last week. Nintendo has previously stated that it plans on releasing five mobile games by 2017.

While PlayStation 4 may be leaps and bounds ahead of Nintendo Wii U in terms of sales, Sony has never been able to seriously challenge Nintendo in the realm of portable gaming. In fact, the Nintendo DS is the second best-selling game console of all time at over 154 million units sold, placing it right behind the PlayStation 2.

Meanwhile, Sony’s PlayStation Portable (PSP), which released the same year as the Nintendo DS, sold roughly half that amount at somewhere around 76 million units.

Whether or not mobile gaming will play out the same way between the two Japanese game companies remains to be seen, but Nintendo certainly did not come out swinging with Miitomo, which is more of a novelty social network than a full-fledged game.

If Sony can offer something more impressive for its new mobile games, it may have a shot at getting one up on Nintendo, at least until Nintendo finally gets smart and uses an IP actually care about for its mobile games.

Photo by jfingas