Sony: The legal battle between Epic and Apple continues to reveal information about the entire gaming industry through the leak of legal documents involving the two giants. New for now Sony’s plans to bring its PlayStation Now service to mobile devices in 2017.
Since the early availability of the service, which allows you to play a collection of PlayStation games for the value of a subscription, the idea has been circulating that it would also be possible to play on mobile phones via the cloud. For some reason that hasn’t happened so far, but the documents show that Sony’s plans at one point were just that.
The information comes from confidential Apple documents, which can only be seen by lawyers, but has been leaked on the internet as usual. Apple apparently had the inside scoop in 2017 that Sony intended to bring PlayStation Now to mobile devices.
We don’t know why these plans haven’t gone through so far. They may have been canceled or may be on hold. PlayStation Now is said to bring hundreds of branded games to mobile phones, especially older ones like the PS3 or PS4. Another excerpt from the document says that more than 450 PS3 games would be available through the service on mobile devices right at launch.
One of the biggest resistances to bringing these services to mobile phones is Apple itself. The company doesn’t make it easy to implement game library subscriptions on their iOS devices, forcing several other companies to join the fray to get their services or find creative ways to get around the restriction.
Sony seems to have a close relationship with Apple, so maybe it didn’t want to enter that battle either, or it’s been negotiating for a long time about how it would work to bring PlayStaion Now to Apple mobile phones.