Pay to play no longer guarantees no microtransactions. There are plenty of modern games that charge 60+ and still contain ingame stores, battle passes, lootboxes, etc
Thing is, there's plenty of Premium games exactly as you describe - it's all I play on mobile or tablet - but they all cost on average between £5-10. Many are ports, some are free to install to play the first couple of levels and then you unlock the game with a one off purchase. The only thing I own good enough to play games on is my tablet and phone so I know this the hard way, but quality is out there, it's just hidden away.
Anyway, £60 is a big step up from the usual £10. I think the Final Fantasy/Ace Attorney ports are about £20. Usually the cheaper price to my mind is that you're playing on a smaller screen and with a touch control system that doesn't always suit the game you're playing (although it can improve certain games - Cultist Simulator, Kingdom Two Crowns and Bad North all feel like they work better with touch controls for me but that's more a genre thing)
Yea, but here, that 60 bucks also gets you the full macOS version of that game.
For sure, it is pretty steep by itself if you only game on mobile, but if you look at it as including a version for your handheld when you buy it for PC… it’s pretty much what Steam already does with the Steamdeck, which makes sense to me.
Now the price itself, yea, I find it a bit expensive, even on PC/Steam and I’ll probably wait to grab it on sale one day.
Yeah, I guess if you own an iPhone and a Mac there's more appeal. I see the prices for things on my son's Switch and he's not old enough to want the really expensive stuff yet, and you don't even get a desktop version there.
I think my original point stands though - that having "you buy it and then you play it" games on mobile is not a new concept.
Here’s the thing: I’ve been an iPhone user since the 3GS (over 14 years) and I’m highly skeptical that this price will sell. KotOR retails at $10 on the App Store as does San Andreas, and both go on sale down to $5 and lower very often. I believe the whole bundle for Final Fantasy 1-6 is like $65 and then FF7 is $15 or $16. Who is the audience for a $60 iOS game??
I recall when BioShock was originally available on the App Store. For one, it cost like maybe $15 at the most, but then it got pulled from the store and then the App Store made the change to 64-bit apps, meaning that even if you’d bought BioShock previously, it would no longer run on newer devices.
Over this last decade, I’ve watched fun, old school games get released for iOS and then pulled and then re-released as crappier MTX versions, if they got re-released at all, countless times. How is RE4 going to be any different?
Not sure if it’s an Apple issue or a developer issue, but for a $60 price tag, there’s got to be at least some sort of guarantee that an iOS update or App Store change won’t render the game suddenly unplayable on my device. iPhone 15 might be ready for AAA games but the App Store and iOS in general are not.
Indeed, when I spot an apparently good mobile port I’m often hesitant to purchase it because an OS update may break compatibility at any point, and most developers don’t give a damn about updating their games so they stay compatible.
Until they fix this major structural issue, I don’t see premium smartphone gaming taking off. People will only invest their money if they have the confidence they’ll be able to play their game for the foreseeable future.
If iOS/MacOS becomes a legitimate gaming platform then that problem solves itself. But the challenge is getting users and retaining them and having them make enough purchases to keep the platform viable meanwhile users want to wait for the platform to be proven to make investments in it, thereby the whole process is a vicious circle of fail.
It would probably take a killer app, and short of buying Nintendo I don’t see how Apple ever breaks that barrier
Yeah, we will see how it goes. Apparently one purchase gives you access on all devices running iOS/TVOS/iPadOS/MacOS but even Mac had a bunch of games that used to be available on the Mac App Store that were delisted when MacBooks transitioned to Apple silicon and are no longer available for purchase
The game being available on both iOS and iPadOS should be a given. TVOS also feels like it should be a standard because of the way Apple’s ecosystem works. A MacOS addition is a nice change, but I’m still left wondering about the target audience for this.
If you’re a gamer, your “main” device isn’t usually within Apple’s ecosystem. Most of the Mac people I know who are gamers use consoles, so for them, it would make more sense to buy this for Xbox or PS5 and use either’s virtual play option to play on iPhone if desired. If you’re a PC gamer, the PC Xbox GamePass option is even better. Gaming on MacOS has always been something that you can do if you really want to make it work, but there have usually been better options available.
I’d like to see true mobile gaming take off, but until there is a sense of stability within the mobile space, I just can’t see it. Phones and tablets are different from consoles. I’m not going to carry around my old iPad 2 just to play my 32-bit mobile games, but I still have my original PS1, PS2, and Xbox 360 hooked up to TVs and can jump onto them anytime I’m home. I still play PC games I bought in 2002 on the PC I purchased in 2022. There’s usually some options available to make games designed for Windows XP run well on Windows 10 or 11.
With Apple in particular, there’s never going to be an option to jury-rig an iPhone to play mobile BioShock again, not without jailbreaking which sort of defeats the purpose of having an iPhone in the first place. That sort of thing is acceptable for maybe $10-15, but for the price of a full game, it feels like throwing a bundle of cash back and forth over an open fire and wondering when it will all get singed.
The mobile market has to make a different approach to “proper” gaming because the space itself is far different from console or PC gaming, and the first place to start is the price point.
This is being reposted everywhere as news but is super misleading. The $60 price tag gets you the universal app, meaning one purchase lets you play the game on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. It’s still a full game just like the Steam version, and if you look at Resident Evil Village, it will surprisingly run super well on M-series Macs.
The distaste comes from mobile apps rarely being over $10, but if you think of it as bonus mobile access alongside a fully fledged macOS game, suddenly nothing is wrong here.
Doesn’t matter. In a few years what will be considered modern will no longer run this game unless the game is updated to just say “yup the game works here too”
Mobile OSes make breaking the knees of legacy support a sport they are champions at
While we're at it, let's remember that this version allows for portable play that can also be plugged into a TV with nothing more than a cable and Bluetooth controller. Or if you really want to play on a PC setup and have a Mac (hint: if you're in the market for an iPhone 15 Pro, it's likely that you do) you can switch to that at no extra cost.
You may not pay an extra $30 for that, but plenty of people would consider that reasonable.
Why does nobody question the price tag in general? 60 USD for a remake, sounds outrageous, no matter what platform.
Because it's a remake. Meaning, it's been re-made. Not remastered. Not reusing assets. Built from scratch. That costs money. If anything, it cost Capcom even more money than the original did, so it's actually impressive that it costs the same now as it did when the original came out.
And porting it to Apple's platforms costs even more money, on top of all that.
By the way you can buy the game for almost half price on other platforms in digital and physical form as well. They are just taking the piss.
Fat lot of good that does for the people who don't own those platforms.
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