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 and MobileGamer.biz 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. According to MobileGamer.biz, 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 opportunities to play it on other systems, including streaming platforms that don't require a hardware purchase.

Many people have fond nostalgic memories of the game and may have been interested when it popped up on the App Store, of course, but that's the kind of nostalgia that's satisfied by downloading it and messing around a bit in the demo area. A $20 port ought to be targeting a new audience that wasn't addressable on any previous platform for which the game was available – so who are those people?

It should go without saying that mobile platforms do tap new markets and audiences that aren't available on other gaming platforms – demographic groups outside the core audience for gaming, people whose interest is too casual to buy dedicated hardware, or people in global regions where smartphones have become ubiquitous while game consoles and PCs remain very rare.

Reaching those markets remains one of the best reasons to release games on mobile devices – but it's worth noting that those markets are also, almost by definition, largely unswayed by big traditional gaming brands like Resident Evil.

I'm not remotely convinced that there's any possible Venn diagram of uniquely mobile-addressable audiences, and people who are into the Resident Evil franchise, in which the overlapping area is big enough to see without squinting. We now have some insight into the size of that overlapping, and, well, it seems to be about $28,000 worth of market.

To be clear, I'm certain that Capcom isn't losing any sleep over this. If the company was concerned about the sales of its iOS Resident Evil ports, it would have stopped after the previous two. Of course, they'd have loved to have earned more from the project, but like games such as Death Stranding before it, the porting of Capcom's modern RE games to iOS and macOS platforms is largely a publicity move for Apple – which no doubt paid well for these efforts – rather than a serious commercial commitment from Capcom.

If Capcom was concerned about the sales of its iOS Resident Evil ports, it would have stopped after the previous two

Apple goes through various phases of wishing to be seen as a more serious player in the games business, and it's currently riding the upward curve of that cycle, with its latest operating systems being updated with various game-friendly features and modes that it's keen to make noise about.

Apple is probably also quite happy with how things have shaken out in this regard; RE7, like the previous two releases, is a very nice port that runs nicely on the latest Apple hardware and makes for a great showcase for the gaming capabilities of these devices.

From Apple's perspective, the simple fact of the game's availability is an advertisement in itself, and the tens of thousands of people who downloaded the trial version of the game and got to experience it as a showcase, regardless of whether they were then converted into paying customers or not.

We could talk about any number of reasons why that conversion didn't happen. Sure, it could be that mobile audiences just balk at paying up-front costs – there's definitely some truth to that, even if it's not the entire truth.

As I said, I'm not sure who the actual target audience is for these games, and that's before we start to talk about the experience of playing an immersive horror game on a phone screen with touch controls. Yes, you can hook up a controller, and even connect the phone to a TV and end up with a pretty solid setup for playing this kind of game, but now the Venn diagram overlap is getting even smaller – who owns a Bluetooth game controller and the cables to hook a phone up to their TV, but not any kind of PC or game console released in the past 15 years? I'm sure such people exist; I'm not sure they're a viable target market.

Still, plenty of people will argue that these points pale in comparison to the pricing issue – that the saturation of the market for this game, or the unsuitability of the platform for the experience it offers, aren't even relevant in the face of the seeming fact that mobile phone audiences simply won't pay up front for games. A solid port of RE7 for $20 might well be an appealing deal to many consumers on a console store; on a mobile device, it's a non-starter, a financial hurdle that's just far too high for the kind of audience that exists on these devices.

It may be a moot point to some extent, but I don't think the problem is simply that free-to-play games dominate this market. Immensely successful free-to-play games exist on consoles and PCs too, and their advent has mostly been complementary to revenues for premium games rather than cannibalising them.

I'm not convinced that there's a Venn diagram of uniquely mobile-addressable audiences, and people who are into the Resident Evil franchise, in which the overlapping area is big enough to see without squinting

The problem on mobile, I'd argue, is that premium games come with a ton of baggage that just doesn't fit with the paradigm of play people expect from these devices – and that's a deeper problem than just a business model issue.

It's not that mobile is all about light, easy titles that you just fritter your time away on – the slightly dismissive "snacks between meals" paradigm of mobile play. That's no longer a fair or accurate characterisation, not in a world where people are spending so much time in games like Fortnite, Genshin Impact, and Dead by Daylight on their smartphones.

Yet those games too have something in common with the lighter, "snack between meals" games that used to characterise mobile gaming; they're designed to be drop-in, drop-out experiences that you can play in relatively short, manageable chunks of time, demanding relatively minimal commitment to hop in, play for a bit, and hop out.

This fits the mobile experience extremely well. An immersive single-player experience simply doesn't. Even if players can and do spend hours on end in Genshin or Fortnite, the fact that they can dip in and out (and that there are long stretches of time when the game only demands their partial attention, which is a stark contrast to premium titles that generally punish players for not devoting their full attention to the game) is a key part of the appeal.

Even if players can and do spend hours on end in Genshin or Fortnite, the fact that they can dip in and out is a key part of the appeal

The final result may be the same, but I'd argue that the problem isn't so much the $20 price tag, as what the $20 price tag communicates to players – which is far more than just saying "pay up front for this game". It's also setting expectations about what the game is going to demand from them in terms of their time and attention.

It's telling mobile players fairly explicitly that this is a game designed with more of a PC or console paradigm in mind. It's going to want you to immerse yourself and give it your undivided attention, and that's not what the audience for mobile games is generally looking for on those devices. So yes, the premium price point is effectively dead on mobile – but it's not just because it can't compete with "free."

It's because premium-priced games were never created with mobile in mind, and aren't what mobile audiences want at any price point; it's because premium pricing has itself become a red flag for whole swathes of the audience, and that's going to be a tougher problem to get around than any price point friction alone could be.