While the news may elicit a “huh?” from most EGM readers, I’m now saddened to learn—and report—one the upcoming death of one of the Vita’s hidden gems of gaming.
For most of you, “PlayStation Mobile” is just that tab in the Vita’s digital store that you either clicked out of curiosity that one time and never bothered with again, or that section that you didn’t even know existed until you sat down to read this chunk of internet text. For me, however, it was a treasure trove of fun and excitement—a world where I never knew what to expect or who I’d see show up.
See, I loved (and still do) the Xbox Indies section of the Xbox 360. Sure, a lot of what it’d receive content-wise over the years was nothing more than hot shovelware garbage, but it marked the beginning of an era when anyone and everyone could just decided to make a game one day, and then release it on a major console. That hadn’t happened before. It was new. Exciting. Weird. Scary. Thrilling.
As the reign of the Xbox Indies started to seem like it would soon be over, along came PlayStation Mobile. Following in the footsteps of another of Sony’s quirky little trial projects, PlayStation Minis, PS Mobile had far more grandiose plans: not only allow indie developers to make and release games for the PlayStation Vita, but also have those games be cross-compatible with Android devices.
In practice, it wasn’t the best of ideas. A lot of the games that we got were touchscreen-based due to that cross-over—a waste on the Vita, a device with plenty of wonderful buttons and analog sticks and physical methods of game control—and keeping projects compatible with all potential hardware options meant severely limiting how far devs could push their games on a technical level. (Later, PS Mobile was moved to being Vita-focused, and this brought updates to the development kits that unlocked more potential power—but, really, by then, it was too late.)
Though I would have loved to have seen PSM garner more support, popularity, and notoriety, I would simply have been happy to just let the service live out its life in relative obscurity. Sadly, that won’t be happening, as Sony has now officially announced that PSM will be taken out behind the barn and put out of its misery on September 10th, 2015. As of that day, all acknowledgement that PlayStation Mobile was even a thing will be washed from Sony’s brain—including the ability for people to re-download any prior purchases. Yuck.
So, if you’re like me, and you actually own a collection of PSM games, what do you do? Well, you’ll need to make sure you have all the games you still want to own downloaded to your Vita or PlayStation TV before September 10th, and that you’ve also activated your hardware properly before that point. In order to do so, go to [Settings] > [PSN] > [System Activation] > [PlayStation Mobile] > [Activate] > [OK]. (Previously, games activated themselves on a regular basis over the internet—now, they’ll be activated one final time for good to allow for play post-September 10th.)
Oh, and if you’re now curious about this whole PlayStation Mobile thing and want something awesome to buy from the service? I cannot recommend Chiebura or Super Crate Box enough.