Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) president Andrew House doesn’t see a “huge market opportunity” for handheld devices, and reiterated the company’s focus on the home console market.
House was speaking with Bloomberg, who wanted to find out if the console maker has any plans to go toe-to-toe with the Nintendo Switch.
Right now, it looks like the answer is ‘no,’ with the SIE chief lamenting its recent experiences in the portable arena with the PlayStation Vita — particularly outside of Japan and Asia.
“The Nintendo device is a hybrid device and that’s a different approach and strategy,” House said in an interview at the Tokyo Game Show. “We have not seen that as being a huge market opportunity.”
“The Vita experience was that outside of Japan and Asia, there was not a huge demand. The lifestyle shift toward the dominance of smartphones as the single key device that is always with you, was the determining factor.”
That pivot towards smartphones is something Sony intends to capitalise on, and just last year the company established a new mobile division called Forwardworks to “deploy new services towards the ever-expanding smart device market.”
Since then, there have been reports suggesting the firm is gearing up to release at least five smartphone titles in March 2018.
“ForwardWorks will leverage the intellectual property of the numerous PlayStation dedicated software titles and its gaming characters […] to provide gaming application optimized for smart devices including smartphones,” said Sony at the time.
“The company will aim to deliver users with opportunity to casually enjoy fully-fledged game titles in the new field of the smart device market.”