It's not just the price tag: premium games don't fit on mobile | Opinion
The conventional wisdom about releasing premium games on mobile platforms is very simple these days. To sum it up in a single word: don't.
To sum it up in a few more words, it's broadly accepted that mobile platforms are the sole preserve of free-to-play models, to the extent that any premium game on these platforms is being sent out to die – that the audience is so accustomed to an up-front price tag of zero that they will balk at being asked to pay anything more, no matter how reasonable the value proposition may appear in a broader context.
If that's your perspective on the mobile market, this week's report that Resident Evil 7 has earned less than $30,000 since its launch on iOS at the start of this month will do nothing to challenge your view.
The estimated numbers from AppMagic suggest that as few as 2,000 people have paid for the game, although it has been downloaded over 80,000 times – meaning that almost 98% of potential customers are bouncing off the $20 payment required to continue past the short demo section.
Nobody should be surprised to see a premium mobile title underperforming in this way – that's a Dog Bites Man story on the best of days. But it's still a little shocking to see just how low the numbers are for a critically acclaimed and much-beloved game like RE7, even if they're not massively out of line with Capcom's earlier mobile releases in the franchise. RE4 Remake and RE Village are also estimated to have sold only a few thousand copies each on iOS.
It's tempting to look at these numbers as further confirmation that mobile is essentially a graveyard for premium priced games; if something as celebrated as RE7 can't sell a decent number of copies, what hope for anyone else?
Stepping back for a moment, though, it's worth asking who the intended market for this port was in the first place. RE7 was released eight years ago; it has been available for every major gaming platform of the past two generations. Anyone interested in the game has had countless
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