Resident Evil and other big games are huge flops on this extremely lucrative platform, it's a disaster. But yet, the publishers are not giving up.
We often talk about our home consoles and our PCs, but we tend to forget that there is a much bigger fleet than that: the smartphone. Playing on your cell phone, your tablet… it's something that everyone does or has done. For some time, publishers have been trying to attract this vast audience, not with mobile games but with versions, ports, of their AAA. The problem… is that it’s a real oven.
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AAA like Resident Evil are struggling on mobile, a real disaster
The numbers speak for themselves and if they only take into account what is happening at Apple (iOS) they are very largely representative of the market trend.
Very popular licenses like Resident Evil or Assassin's Creed are monstrous failures. Same story with ambitious and extremely well-received AAAs like Death Stranding. None of them manage to stand out from the crowd. We are talking here about games which have sold between 3,000 and 15,000 copies depending on the organization. An alarming finding, even when we look at the best estimates. Mobilegamer reported on iOS market AAAs based on figures estimated by Appfigures and also shared those calculated by Appmagic, another source.
According to the report, a title like Assassin's Creed Mirage (€49.99) was reportedly downloaded between 123,000 and 280,000 times for its free version for estimated sales of between 3,000 and 5,750 units. A game like Resident Evil 4 (€29.99) was reportedly downloaded between 357,000 and 710,000 times for 7,000 to 15,000 units sold. Resident Evil Village (€15.99) doesn't do much better with 370,000 to 817,000 downloads for estimated sales of 34,000 units at most.
And yet, it's not over
These are just estimates from two different organizations, but even taking the most optimistic estimates, the picture is far from idyllic. Remember that these are only figures from the iOS market. But the fact is that they are representative of the state of the market. The problem comes in particular from the price of games but also from the fact that most require having high-end smartphones.
Mobile gamers don't seem to be too keen on AAA, but the market is nevertheless one of the most profitable in the industry, if not the most, quite simply.
But consumers are clearly more inclined to spend tens, hundreds and sometimes even thousands of euros on free-to-play games that abound in the stores than to put their hands in their wallets for a so-called “premium” game. That being said, publishers still continue to try, as Capcom will soon do with its mobile Resident Evil 7 for example. It remains to be seen whether or not the trend will change in the future.
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