In recent years, Nintendo has been able to grow its brand and expand its IP with mobile game apps. To date, the cumulative number of unique downloads for Nintendo apps has now surpassed 950 million, and it's banked a lot of coin in that time.
It's a market that's ripe for the picking, and in some industry news this week, Sony's PlayStation Studios has now announced it will be stepping up its game with the release of a new "free to download" Ratchet & Clank multiplayer mobile title. As our colleagues at Push Square note, although Sony has been dabbling with mobile games for a while, this is seemingly "one of the first real attempts" to bring its IP to this platform.
Watch on YouTubeSubscribe to Nintendo Life on YouTube841k
The game is officially titled Ratchet and Clank: Ranger Rumble, and it's notably drawn some comparisons to games like Rocket League and even the Metroid Prime spin-off Federation Force. The Metroid comparison has been spurred on by a mode called Blast Ball, which you might remember was a dedicated competitive multiplayer experience on the 3DS.
Much like Nintendo with Super Mario, Animal Crossing and other IP like Fire Emblem, PlayStation appears to be following up this Ratchet & Clank title with a new Horizon MMO for mobile (and PC) that's already leaked.
Obviously, there's a huge audience on mobile, so Nintendo and PlayStation can easily co-exist, but this is a notable development on the PlayStation front. And it's easy to see why Sony might have also considered this market after the success Nintendo has had in this space. After all, it's always kept a close eye on Nintendo.
As for Nintendo's mobile expansion, it most recently launched the new title Fire Emblem Shadows on Android and iOS devices in September. Earlier this month, it also released a new mobile application in select regions, which allows users to access its storefront. In some other industry news, Valve has announced a new Steam Machine this week, and Nintendo dropped a trailer for the new Mario Movie.