PlayStation Mobile goes live, allows integration between gaming devices

Sony’s cross-platform mobile gaming service, titled PlayStation Mobile, has gone live. According to The Verge, the service allows players to experience PlayStation mobile games across multiple devices, such as Sony’s PlayStation Vita and certain certified Android smartphones and tablets.

Users of PlayStation Mobile are able to access the PlayStation Store from their certified devices and the purchases made there will be tied to the users’ PlayStation Network ID. A single purchase of a PlayStation Mobile game will allow users to play the game on any of the certified devices, ranging from the PlayStation Vita to the Sony Xperia devices.

While the service has launched, it is not yet available in all countries. For now, the countries that have PlayStation Mobile available are Japan, United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Australia. More countries are said to follow later on.

PlayStation Mobile has gone live

The launch titles for PlayStation Mobile include Super Crate Box, Wipe!, Revel, Hungry Giraffe, Samurai Beatdown, Beats Slider, Numblast and Everybody’s Arcade, among other titles.

Recently, Sony had announced that third party support for its handheld system – the PlayStation Vita – has been disappointing. "One thing that was surprising and disappointing to us was the [lower] number of third parties to come out [in support] after launch," Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony Worldwide Studios, told Gamasutra. "In retrospect, there are so many options for publishers now that we cannot take it for granted that our new platform would be supported by third parties, like [it would've been] many years ago."

It was revealed last month that homebrew developer Yifan Lu is now working on a crack for the PlayStation Vita that will allow homebrew software to run on the device. The main way to bypass the PS Vita’s tight code is an unnamed exploit. There is no doubt that Sony will work on fixing the exploit as soon as possible, as the company is very much against letting its systems such as the PlayStation 3 and the PlayStation Portable (PSP) get cracked. Players not only run homebrew apps and games with cracked software, but also pirated copies of games. The PSP is one of the most famous handheld systems purely because of homebrew software and piracy. Yifan claims that the exploit isn’t meant to be used for piracy, but what others do with the exploit is up to them.

Indie developer Wolfgang Wozniak has raised concerns over the exploit on Twitter in a conversation with Yifan. “Why would people want to buy games when they can just download my game from the next and load it up. It's not on a cart,” tweeted Wozniak. Yifan revealed in the conversation that the PS Vita would take months – at least half a year – to crack successfully.

Back in August, Kazuo Hirai, the CEO of Sony, revealed that the performance of the PlayStation Vita has been doing close to expectations of the company. The device has met scepticism among some analysts who doubt whether there is a place for such a device in a market which is increasingly dominated by games played on smartphones and tablets. "Worldwide, the Vita is pretty much along where we would expect it to be, maybe trending behind in certain territories," Hirai told Reuters on the sidelines of IFA, Europe's biggest consumer trade show, held in Berlin.