Today, as planned by Sony, the PlayStation Mobile app store has opened, supporting the PS Vita and a number of devices certified by the Japanese company on the Android platform. The store’s starter package is 20 games.
The Sony-supervised service is designed to unite the mobile market and the mobile console market, allowing developers to support games available on both platforms.
Currently, PlayStation Mobile is only available in nine countries: Japan, USA, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Australia. Sony promises that this list will expand within a few months.
In November, the Japanese also plan to start distributing the PlayStation Mobile SDK. In their opinion, this way the platform will be able to interest indie developers. The price for the SDK will be $99.9 per year.
“PlayStation is a well–known brand, and now, thanks to PlayStation Mobile, it is also on the mobile market. Today we have launched 20 games on the platform, most of which were developed by independent developers,” says Shahid Ahmad, head of the European business unit of Sony Computer Entertainment.
“This is a new platform that will transfer PlayStation games to mobile devices, and mobile games to PlayStation,” he adds.
At the moment, the platform supports the following devices: PS Vita, Xperia acro, Xperia acro HD, Xperia ion, Xperia S, Xperia arc, Xperia Play, Sony Tablet S, Sony Tablet P, HTC One S, HTC One X, and HTC One V. The main problem with the service is that it forces developers to code in C#. Recall that it is the need to work with C# when developing applications for Windows Phone 7 that is considered the reason for the low popularity of the Microsoft platform among developers.