Why AAA games promoted by Apple flop in the App Store
Confirming the fairly obvious, analysis of major iOS game launches including "Death Stranding" and "Assassin's Creed Mirage" has revealed that pricing games at console levels simply doesn't work in the App Store.
Death Stranding, a AAA game ported to iOS
Gaming is a big earner for Apple's App Store. Apple's Q1 revenue for the App Store hitting $13 billion, mostly because the iPhone continues to be the world's largest addressable gaming market.
While mobile gaming is big business, attempts to bring actual console games to the platform continue to fail.
Apple has tried to paint its ecosystem as a great platform for game development. It even managed to convince the developers of games such as "Assassins Creed Mirage," "Death Stranding," and the "Resident Evil" series to release them on iPhone and iPad.
Analysis of the games by MobileGamer.biz using data from Appfigures and Appmagic indicates that there have been astoundingly few purchases of each title in the App Store.
Very few payers
Assassin's Creed Mirage was downloaded approximately 123,000 times since June 6, Appfigures says. However, it has only managed gross revenue of $138,000.
The report believes that the revenue level indicates that fewer than 3,000 people were willing to unlock the full game at $49.99.
Assassin's Creed Mirage launch sales on iOS
The game performed worse than a previous made-for-mobile release. Assassin's Creed Rebellion launched in November 2018, but managed 1.9 million downloads and $981,000 in revenue for the same post-launch period.
More damning is that Rebellion saw revenue grow 82% over the launch period, versus a 79% decline for Mirage.
The only people who will know the real numbers are Apple and Ubisoft, but the figures aren't off by an order of magnitude that would be required for the ports to recoup labor costs for the port. Another firm offered higher, but still dismal, numbers of 279,000 downloads and $221,000 in revenue for Mirage.
There is a disparity, but it's still close enough to demonstrate that the sales of Mirage hasn't yet reached the millions of dollars level.
More gaming bombs
The problem isn't just felt by Ubisoft. Others that Apple prominently featured in its presentations have suffered a similar fate.
Resident Evil 4 has been downloaded 357,000 times, analysts say, with revenue of just $208,000. At a $29.99 price to unlock, about 7,000 people actually paid for the full game.
Resident Evil 7 managed to hit 817,000 downloads, said Appmagic, and $420,000 in revenue. With a cheaper $15.99 price, that equates to about 34,000 people paying for it.
Death Stranding has also failed to capture the audience, earning $348,000 to date. Requiring an up-front purchase of $19.99, the game hasn't been downloaded enough to be listed by Appfigures, but it probably managed just 23,000 sales.
Painful price points
The biggest problem these AAA-style releases on iPhone has relates to money, and it's something the analysts agree on. With premium mobile games priced at between $5 and $10, along with a sea of titles offering free-to-play gaming, that makes for a tough market for a high-priced game to penetrate.
There's also the allure of console gaming that can get in the way.
"Players who can afford flagship mobile devices and $50 for games are likely to have the resources to enjoy games on PC and console as well," said Appmagic's Andrei Zubov. "On the other hand, players who can't afford gaming devices or high-performance mobile phones are less likely to make a one-time $50 purchase.
It costs $49.99 to unlock Assassin's Creed Mirage on iOS
Appfigures' Randy Nelson adds that the iPhone 15 Pro models and similar smartphones have made "enormous progress towards technological parity with current-gen consoles." However, Nelson fears that consumers may not actually know about the performance gains on mobile.
"It's uncertain how many actually realize it and consequently even consider they might be able to play the latest Resident Evil or Assassin's Creed on their phone," he continued.
An expensive experiment
Apple has introduced more performance to its devices over the years, and has really started to make a push for gaming. Not only on mobile, but also to get more games to work on Mac using tools like the Game Porting Kit.
During WWDC, it introduced a second-generation version of the kit, as well as how multiple titles will be brought to the platform in the future.
As for the developers and publishers witnessing the relatively small trickle of sales, this could sway some away from continuing on the platform if it doesn't improve.
That said, the aforementioned AAA games aren't necessarily the most expensive ones to produce on an iPhone or iPad.
Some of the games being ported to macOS
With games often built for multiple platforms at once, in part thanks to cross-platform tools like the Unreal Engine, developers can make games for multiple consoles and for PC at the same time.
In the case of games like Death Stranding, the various graphical resources and media needed for it already exist for the console versions. It seems like it's a big-budget endeavor, but the money's already been spent on the non-iPhone versions.
Bringing AAA games to mobile therefore doesn't require a complete rebuild of the game from the ground up in the majority of cases. Changes to the interface, as well as some in-game elements to adapt it to touchscreen gaming, still require programmer labor, though, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars for the complete job.
At these low levels of revenue, the publishers have so far lost money on their investments. But, given that games could cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to produce, mobile ports can be a drop in the financial ocean.
Ports cost money to produce, but far from the cost of making an entire game from scratch.
There's also the prospect of AAA mobile gaming becoming more accepted by gamers as time moves on. With more major titles arriving on iOS and iPadOS, as well as Mac, this makes Apple's ecosystem seem more like a legitimate gaming platform.
Even so, it's a struggle at the moment as the AAA ports are only really playable on Apple's flagship models of iPhone and iPad. This automatically reduces the potential sales compared to having wider iPhone compatibility.
It also doesn't help that, in these particular cases, we're talking about games that have seen success on consoles quite some time ago. Death Stranding originally shipped in November 2019, Resident Evil 4 was first released in January 2005, and Resident Evil 7 went on sale in 2017.
The games only really had Apple's announcements as the marketing for the ported versions, with little other real-world advertising. You could expect that, if launched alongside the console editions and benefiting from the increased multi-platform marketing efforts, there would also be more sales.
It certainly won't happen overnight for the market. But, if the pricing issue is worked out and with enough titles available, it could one day become a viable option for gamers instead of the latest console.
So long as those who make the games can bear to wait that long.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
Also, based on my own experience ports usually are horrible, so I wouldn't touch them with a long pole.
Where are the AAA-Games that are Apple First?
I would also guess, that the whole Apple Game fetish will eventually die/disappear like the other 3(?) times they promised to push for games, that never shown any lifesigns.
There is a market space between casual mobile gamer and console gamer.
The problem in the past with AAA games on Mac is they didn’t actually port the games. They lazily wrapped the Windows version in Cider and expected Mac users to be happy with the performance hit running an emulator gives.
Ive said it once and I’ll say it a million times, developers and publishers are their own worst enemies. No one is going to pay top dollar for a AAA game being wrapped in Cider that doesn’t have the same performance or features as the PC or console games. I mean how many games ported to Macs can play multiplayer against PC?
But Apple is changing that with GameKit and Metal the latter of which has been prove. In many cases to be more powerful than DirectX. In fact in the past, when a game has been written for Mac hardware alongside PC hardware the Macs have outperformed the PCs. World of Warcraft was one of them.
This leads to the point made in the article, most people just don’t understand how powerful Macs are compared to their PC counterparts mostly because PC users are pathetically moulded to believe higher numbers equals better performance.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/05/01/iphone-15-pro-is-unexpectedly-the-sales-champion-of-spring-2024
This would be around 100m units worldwide.
Sales will be affected when the games are only being playable on <10% of the userbase and the people who own those devices likely aren't kids who are into mobile gaming.
Once A17 Pro makes its way into more mainstream models, AAA games will be more viable on mobile.
Even with 10x unit sales eventually, revenue in the single digit millions is still low vs AAA releases. RE4 sold 7m copies at $60 = $420m across the main platforms Playstation, XBox and PC, roughly $140m each. For iOS to be considered a tier-1 platform, it would need to top $50m.
To get another 10x in revenue, games have to be adapted to the mobile business model, which is using micro-transactions e.g first level free, $10 for the rest of the game, $5 for weapons/health packs, $5 for DLC, $5 for character styles. Businesses are reluctant to lower prices but it's the only way it works on mobile and the unit volume is higher if the game is accessible to the whole 1b userbase.
Within 3 years, this userbase will be over 0.5b and will top 1b in 6 years. If they price the base game at $10, they can expect 1m+ paid users.
Apple should promote big budget and popular games more in the App Store in a special section (premium games), it's not fair on developers who put such high budgets into a game to be lumped in with thousands of low budget games. If a low budget game like Wordle becomes popular then it can go in there too. The premium games should be the first games presented to every App Store user and hide apps they already have installed by default.
Or maybe Apple overstated the performance of its products.
This is how a 1050 runs, RE4 gets 30FPS 1080p low:
https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-1050-Notebook.178614.0.html
There aren't many new games on that page in green but a few that performed well include Diablo 4, Elden Ring, Forza 5, Far Cry 6, Mass Effect, Doom Eternal, Jedi Fallen Order, Modern Warfare 2019 and there are quite a few further down the page. It's best suited for 2019 or older games.
iPhone gets 30FPS in RE4 too and it looks ok:
Apple also hasn't integrated frame-generation in MetalFX yet, which is in AMD FSR 3. This can boost framerate 1.5-2x.
These ports are well made with native Metal renderers and MetalFX support but there's only so much they can do with mobile computer power. The iPhone is only around 2-3x the Nintendo Switch. It's a good baseline performance to have though, every iPhone going forward will be capable of running titles like this and the userbase will exceed consoles in a year (not all gamers but it's a good sized audience).
The need for a controller also hinders sales of these kind of titles on mobile because there isn't a model that is well promoted, most people wouldn't know where to start. Consoles all ship with good controllers. I always felt Apple should ship a minimal controller that just has shoulder bumpers but uses the touch screen for movement and aim and they can help promote 3rd party controllers inside the game pages on the App Store.
Add to it the churlish "blame the developer" attitude, when all of these most recent games were produced with direct help from Apple, and one can imagine why developers would have dim interest in the platform. A pittance in sales is not worth the complexity to achieve baselines of performance or the agitation from an entitled, ungrateful user base.
Stray is not on sal this time but I think it was a few weeks ago.
Where are updated Games like the original, Jedi Academy, Jedi Outcast, Castle Wolfenstein, Red Orchestra, American McGee's Alice (has a great soundtrack which is in the Apple Music store currently), Battle Chess, Lemmings, Defender of the Crown. With any game great gameplay is king how many games out there are centuries old? Why gameplay. Some digital games (can) be the same.
The screen is comparatively tiny, which not only wastes a lot of the graphical appeal, it also makes visual ques much harder to notice. Perhaps even more damning, the interactions of the original games were designed for either a console controller or mouse and keyboard. It's not unusual to have 15 or more keybinds. Squeezing that kind of complex control scheme, which you ideally want to master in a flow state, onto a smallish touch screen often results in a very unsatisfactory experience.
Believeing that porting pricy and dated AAA consaole/PC games to iPhones, or even iPads, would be a successful strategy, just reveals a deep ignorance of hardcore gamer preferences.
iPhone 5W (2TFLOPs), M3 10W (4TFLOPs), M3 Pro 20W (8TFLOPs), M3 Max 40W (16TFLOPs)
There may be a way to pull off more impressive performance. I wonder if the Neural Engine or similar chip could be used to do real-time lighting in games, which is one of the most intensive parts of a modern game. Hardware raytracing is designed to do ray intersections but it's unusably slow on low-end hardware so most games still use traditional lighting engines. The Neural Engine can handle 38 trillion ops/s (possibly 8-bit, might be 16), the iPhone GPU is 2 trillion floating-point (32-bit) ops/s.
If Apple had a Metal Lighting API where a game dev could pass geometry with emissive and transparency properties (can be a voxel/signed-distance field volume) and lights with color info in and it would compute a form of screen-space GI and pass the shaded buffer back to the game, that must be able to speed up rendering and it would mean devs don't have to use lightmaps or a game engine's slow lighting engine. Given how important games are on mobile, a hardware-accelerated lighting engine would be very useful. This would be like hardware-accelerated Lumen, which can also use hardware raytracing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dc1PPYl2uxA&t=366s
The hardware lighting engine would do the shadow pass from geometry, the GPU would do the unlit albedo texture pass with materials using the buffer from the lighting pass and post-process the output to match the art direction on other platforms.