PlayStation Suite to bring big titles to Android phones

The “Next Generation Portable” a.k.a. the PSP2, was announced two weeks ago at Sony’s ‘Playstation Meeting 2011’. The world stared, the world gaped and the world was awed. Quite right too: few had been expecting such an impressive device. (Thankfully it won’t be long before the device itself slams onto our supermarket shelves).

But while the world stared doe-eyed, cooing over the newborn baby, another equally important announcement passed right over everyone’s heads. It wasn’t just a new console; it was 32 million new consoles. Sony announced the PlayStation Suite, a hardware-independent platform that will bring a whole new way of gaming to a range of devices, starting with any mobile phone running on Android 2.3. You read that right, _any _Android phone that can run version 2.3.

This is great news for any owners of those aforementioned smartphones. Sony have already guaranteed that they’ll be bringing PlayStation One games to the Suite within the calendar year, so owners can look forward to some sweet 3D PS One titles – um, Crash Bandicoot anyone? Third-party titles have also been assured, although no names have been dropped, yet.

Developers are likely, however, to sign up in droves to this new initiative, as it’s great news for anyone in the business of building games. The whole concept behind the Suite is that it’s hardware-independent, meaning that a game built to run on one smartphone will also run on any other. Compatibility is a big gripe for developers and users alike, and hopefully the Playstation Suite will allow more time to be spent on actually building games, rather than porting them from one platform to another.

The Suite is not limited to Android phones either. There have been rumours that Sony is planning to bring the framework to a lot of new, unconventional platforms. The PlayStation 3 seems an obvious choice, and bringing the Suite to the iPhone and even to Windows has also been rumoured. Given their place in the TV market, some sources have suggested that Sony also want to open it up Internet-enabled Bravia TVs, too.

Whatever the specifics, the PlayStation Suite is certainly a huge leap in a new direction for Sony. Some commentators have been sceptical over whether or not such a system really can be made compatible over such a large range of hardware. Certainly, bringing games to any Android phone is a massive technical challenge, and Sony has quite a suite of problems to solve. But with the potential to bring big name titles onto so many new devices, let’s all keep our fingers crossed that they manage it!