Good news for consoles: nobody wants to pay full price for Resident Evil 4 on iPhone
Even if you can afford an iPhone 15 full price video games are a step too far (Apple)
New figures suggest that releasing games like Assassin’s Creed Mirage and Death Stranding on high-end mobile has been a complete failure.
The current turmoil in the games industry threatens previously unimagined change, with the very concept of consoles now under question, especially as both Xbox and PlayStation embrace the PC format.
Consoles won’t be going away entirely, with Microsoft already confirming it’s working on next gen hardware, but while it’s tempting to imagine that mobile phones could eventually take over there is one intractable problem: no one wants to pay for anything on smartphones.
Most games are free or extremely cheap and although there have been recent attempts to charge full price for new games on high-end phones, new data reveals it’s been a complete failure.
Last year, big name games such as the Resident Evil 4 remake and Assassin’s Creed Mirage, were released on high-end iOS devices, attracting a lot of fanfare but, as it turns out, very few sales.
The caveat here is that the games only run on a few of the most expensive models of iPhone and iPad, so they weren’t available to everyone, but even so, it’s estimated that Mirage sold as little as 3,000 copies worldwide.
The game was downloaded around 123,000 times, since a small part of it was available to play for free as a sort of demo. To unlock the full game though costs £44.99 (the same as the console editions), which very few people were willing to pay.
Although there are no officially released figures the estimates come via mobilegamer.biz and suggest that only around 7,000 bought Resident Evil 4 on iOS, which was cheaper at £24.90 (it was originally going to be £57.99).
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