Sony said to launch “5 or more” smartphone games

Sony is reportedly gearing up to make a bigger splash in the smartphone gaming market, Nikkei said on Thursday. Sony isn’t new to this area but it sounds like there are new efforts being reignited behind the scenes.

Nikkei said the smartphone titles — more than 5 are expected in total — should be familiar to gamers and will be “based on popular PlayStation series.” That suggests there will be brand new games, in addition to other titles that “cannot be played on the latest hardware.” You may be in for a wait, however.

Nikkei said that, while Sony may begin to announce titles sometime this year, the first ones aren’t expected to be available to smartphone gamers until March 2018.

Why this matters:

Sony has had its cap in the smartphone game for a while — remember the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play?– but those efforts haven’t exactly played out that well.

PlayStation Mobile was also an earlier attempt by Sony to play in the smartphone market, though that initiative was eventually terminated.

In fact, Sony’s “ForwardWorks,” which was oddly not mentioned in the Nikkei report, has already announced intentions to bring PlayStation games to Android and iOS.