Resident Evil and other big games are huge flops on this extremely lucrative platform, it’s a disaster. But the publishers aren’t giving up.
We often talk about our home consoles and our PCs, but we often forget that there is a much larger fleet: the smartphone. Playing games on the phone, the tablet… everyone does it or has done it. For some time now, publishers have been trying to attract this l arge audience, not with mobile games, but with versions, ports, their AAA. The problem… is that it’s a real furnace.
AAA like Resident Evil have problems on mobile devices, a real disaster
The numbers speak for themselves and if you only consider the developments at Apple (iOS), they are largely representative of market developments.
Very popular licenses like Resident Evil or Assassin’s Creed are monstrous failures. The same goes for ambitious and extremely well-received AAAs like Death Stranding. None of them manage to stand out from the crowd. We are talking about games that have sold between 3,000 and 15,000 copies, depending on the organization. An alarming finding even if we consider the best estimates. Mobilegamer gave a major update on the AAAs of the iOS market based on estimates from Appfigures and also shared the figures calculated by Appmagic, another source.
According to the report, a title like Assassin’s Creed Mirage
And yet it is not over yet
These are just estimates from two different organizations, but even the most optimistic estimates paint a far from idyllic picture. Remember that these are just numbers from the iOS market, but the fact is that they are representative of the market situation. The problem arises in particular from the price of the games, but also from the fact that most games require high-end smartphones.
Mobile gamers obviously don’t seem to like AAA very much, but the market is still one of the most profitable in the industry, if not the most profitable.
But consumers are clearly more inclined to spend tens, hundreds and sometimes even thousands of dollars on free-to-play games that are plentiful in stores than to shell out for a so-called “premium” game. Yet publishers keep trying, as Capcom will soon do with its Resident Evil 7 Mobile, for example. It remains to be seen whether the trend will change in the future.