Resident Evil Village on iOS makes cases both for and against cloud streaming | Opinion

gamesindustry.biz:

Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox

We don't generally think of mobile games as being graphical powerhouses, but over the years there have been quite a few games which managed high-end visuals on mobile hardware – from early showcases like Infinity Blade through to the enormous open world of Genshin Impact, there have always been games that pushed the envelope of what mobile hardware could do.

Even so, it's hard not to feel both surprised and impressed by what Capcom's developers have accomplished with Resident Evil Village on iOS. First shown off on stage at Apple's September launch event for the iPhone 15, the game offers graphical fidelity that's pretty much indistinguishable, at least to the layman's eye, from the experience of playing on a PlayStation 5. This is not, as far as we know, a game that was designed with mobile in mind, as opposed to the aforementioned Genshin Impact – it's a full-bore AAA console title, running with no noticeable compromises on a smartphone. Hook it up to a controller, and it's very easy to forget that you're not playing this on dedicated gaming hardware.

Of course, if we take a step back for a moment, it's worth noting that the iPhone 15 Pro and the current iPad Pros which run RE Village most effectively are brand new hardware priced at well over $1,000, while the PS5 it was originally created to run on is three years old and costs $500. This isn't an apples-to-apples comparison (no pun intended) – smartphones and tablets also have things like screens, batteries, 5G radios, and cameras, and can't take the console hardware approach of slapping a gigantic heatsink and fan on the chips to keep them cool – but still, it shouldn't entirely come as a