Those of you who aren’t iPhone fans might want to take notice — the PlayStation Store is coming to Android later this year. Announced early this morning, Sony will be providing a hardware certification program for Android handset manufacturers where they can offer PlayStation Content such as PSOne Classics, Minis and other new titles being developed. The new initiative, being dubbed “PlayStation®Suite”, will require at least Android 2.3 and devices will need to be hardware certified first.
What this means is that PlayStation content will be available to millions of more gamers than previously available. I guess this gives credit that those PSP Phone rumors (which we expect to be announced shortly). While I don’t expect most Android devices currently on the market to be able to take advantage of the new game tools, I would suspect most being announced this year for release in late 2011 and beyond will be able to access the PlayStation Store.
Games developed for PlayStation Suite will also be playable on the new NGP handheld, meaning that developing once will allow a broader audience and potential greater return on the development dollars. No word yet on any restrictions of games submitted to PlayStation Suite (ie. size, network usage, etc), but we expect more details around E3 this year.
