Kazuo Hirai: PlayStation Games Coming to Other Devices

Kazuo Hirai, number two at Sony, has said the Japanese company is in talks with smartphone and tablet computer manufacturers to bring more PlayStation games to non-Sony portable devices.

PlayStation Suite is a smartphone/tablet app for two Sony tablets, the Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY smartphone, and Google’s Android platform. However, Hirai and his fellow Sony execs would like to see it expanded to other devices:

“This isn’t an ecosystem where we want to keep everything within the Sony family. This is not just for Sony devices.”

Sony’s PlayStation Suite is the company’s answer to the increasingly popularity of cheap app games, which have overtaken dedicated gaming devices such as Sony’s PSP and Nintendo’s series of DS/3DS handhelds. As Hirai acknowledges, “[Smartphone games] have had an impact on the traditional videogame market.”

Sony’s dalliance with bringing games to other devices goes back years, right back to the ill-fated PSX. The company’s Xperia Play smartphone released last year with a slide-out game controller and played PSOne games.

Increasingly, game developers are expanding their games to other platforms. A future where we play Sony and Nintendo games on Apple and Samsung devices suddenly doesn’t seem so far-fetched.