TriplePoints of Interest – Week of October 10

Steam PlayStation 4 — Image courtesy of Valve.

In this week’s TriplePoints of Interest esports is taking away from traditional sports viewing time, Sony is releasing numerous mobile games in early 2018, and Valve is adding native DualShock 4 support to Steam.

Esports more popular than ice hockey among millennials

A new report released by Newzoo for the month of October highlights significant overlap between traditional sports viewers and esports enthusiasts, reports The Esports Observer. Newzoo found that a 9.6 million fan overlap exists between basketball and esports. Additionally, 76% of esports enthusiasts state that the time they spend watching esports is taking away from the time they used to spend watching traditional sports. This may explain the recent news of several NBA teams purchasing and investing in esports franchises, as we’ve reported past TPoIs!

Sony ForwardWorks to release up to six games across the next 18 months

The Wall Street Journal reported that Sony’s mobile studio, ForwardWorks, is aiming to release five or more smartphone games in the year ending March 2018. The upcoming smartphone games will be “based on popular PlayStation series” and will first roll out in Japan followed by some other regions in Asia. Sony added that ForwardWorks “will aim to deliver users with opportunity to casually enjoy full-fledged game titles in the new field of the smart device market.”

Steam getting native PlayStation 4 controller support
Valve’s Jeff Bellinghausen announced that Valve is bringing native support for Sony’s DualShock 4 controller to Steam. Polygon picked up the news out of the Steam Dev Days event, where the core focus of the talk was about the Steam controller’s function. Bellinghausen said that Valve plans to support other controllers in the future as well.