Ten days after changing the brand name of “PlayStation Suite” to “PlayStation Mobile” during the E3, Sony Computer Entertainment President Andrew House gave an interesting interview to Japanese business daily The Nikkei today.
House said that the Android-based mobile game service will be launched sometime “during the second half of this year”, without giving further details.
What’s much more interesting: in contrast to what has been widely expected to be Playstation Mobile’s business model (pay-per-download), Sony is actually thinking about going free-to-play on Android. House said that users might be able to download titles for free and be charged for in-game virtual items.
This would be the first time for Sony Computer Entertainment to replicate the business model that GREE, Mobage operator DeNA, Zynga, and a plethora of mobile game makers worldwide consider to be the go-to solution in terms of monetization at the moment.
Nintendo resisted for a long time but finally started offering downloadable content for money for some of their mobile games earlier this year: Nintendo, however, doesn’t offer virtual items per se but paid content like additional levels within boxed, paid games – which is a big difference to Sony’s possible move.
Regarding free-to-play, Nintendo boss Satoru Iwata was quoted as saying he “has no intention to deny every possibility of free-to-play” just a few days ago, during E3 in the US.
