The Playstation Suite: Playstation Games for All* Android Phones

Sony Eric­s­son XPERIA Play

Sony announced the PlaySta­tion Suite which is an Android store full of PSOne games. Sony will also launch a qual­ity assur­ance scheme called PlaySta­tion Cer­ti­fied which is bound to attract the mobile game giants and more high qual­ity games. *The ser­vice will be avail­able for any device with Android 2.3 and above — the Nexus S is the only com­pat­i­ble device on sale now(~0.4% of Android devices).

This is great news for Android own­ers. The strat­egy is in direct com­pe­ti­tion with the XBox expe­ri­ence you get on Win­dows Phone 7. Sony has done what hack­ers have been doing for a while now — emu­lat­ing PSOne games. They plan to go fur­ther with the move, pos­si­bly bring­ing PSP and then PS2 tit­tles into the mix.

The key to the suc­cess of this thing is pric­ing. Peo­ple who use PSOne emu­la­tors have been enjoy­ing PSOne games for free. If Sony places some ridicu­lous price tags given that fact, and given that games on the Android Mar­ket and iOS App Store are dirt cheap, they will fail. In fact, each game should cost US$0.99. There, I said it, bang! I really do hope this pans out; it will be one more rea­son to get an Android phone/tablet.