Sony has taken a page out of Nintendo and Razer’s books with it’s latest patent. The company appears to be working on a device that’ll turn your smartphone into a portable console.
Video Games Chronicle was first to spot the patent, reporting that it was published by SIE’s Japanese division this week.
According to VGC, the device resembles the PS4’s DualShock 4 controller more so than the PS5’s DualSense one and is described in the patent as “a left side grip portion and a right side grip portion gripped by the left and right hands of the user”.
While you can already connect your PlayStation controller to your smartphone with the PS Remote Play app, this device will add controls to either side of your phone’s display turning it into something that looks more like the Razer Kishi or the Nintendo Switch – albeit for PlayStation games instead of Nintendo titles in the case of the latter.
The controller apparently also includes the additional advantage of “a shaft portion that can be tilted by the user, and detect the tilting direction and tilting amount of the shaft portion”, making it seem a bit more dynamic than the Kishi.
The device would also mark another step in Sony’s plans to push further into mobile gaming.
Earlier this year, the company released a job posting looking for a new Head of Mobile to develop the mobile games strategy for PlayStation Studios.
The listing called for a candidate to “lead all aspects of the expansion of our game development from consoles and PCs to mobile and live services with a focus on successfully adapting PlayStation’s most popular franchises for mobile”.
The company offered more insight into its plans during a Q&A session at Sony’s investor relations day in May, when CEO Jim Ryan revealed that the company would be bringing more first-party PlayStation IP off-console in 2021 and 2022.
“In FY21 we will begin to publish some of our iconic PlayStation IP on mobile and we anticipate that in 2021, that will not provide a significant profit flow, but we do anticipate that as we learn from that experience, and as we increase the number of titles that we publish on mobile, the contribution from both PC and mobile will start to become steadily more important as time passes”, announced Ryan (via Video Games Chronicle).
At this point, Sony has only filed a patent for the mobile controller, so there’s no saying whether it’ll go through with the idea. We’ll have to wait and see whether the brand launches it’s answer to the Razer Kishi anytime soon.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
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We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.