Those AAA game ports for iPhone and iPad have bombed | Hacker News Reader

Those AAA game ports for iPhone and iPad have bombed

mobilegamer.biz

12 pointsjsheard15 comments

$49.99 for a phone game? There's your problem. It's $49.99 for the same game on Xbox or Playstation, where you can play it with a controller on a much bigger screen. Normally you'd be playing it with the sound from your TV or headphones, on mobile you've usually got no sound or earphones. It's like David Lynch said, "You'll think you have experienced it, but you'll be cheated. It's such a sadness that you think you've seen a film on your fucking telephone. Get real!"

The controls look terrible as well, really complicated. It's like porting Excel to iOS, it works but it's clunky as hell because that's not what it's designed for.

Basically nobody who owns a PC or console would choose to buy a full-price port for their phone, and not many people who don't own one would be interested because of the price.

Assassin's Creed went for the obviously optimistic $50 but the other games mentioned were priced lower and still performed poorly. RE4 Remake is $30, Death Stranding is $20, and RE Village is just $16.

it also requires iphone 15 pro or iphone 15 pro max. so the target audience in all likelihood is the combination of, a. doesnt have a pc/console/handheld or likes the game/genre so much they want to carry it around b. has the disposable income to buy an iphone 15 pro

so yeah, tough ask

But can’t you play it with a controller and Airplay to a TV, so why not use your iPhone as your console? In fact, why use a console when you can take the game with you as well?

If you want that, a Nintendo Switch or Steam Deck will give the same user experience while each having a vastly larger catalog of AAA titles. Steam specifically also has frequent substantial discounts on games, so even the upfront purchase price of a separate mobile console may eventually be offset by cheaper game purchases.

IME Airplay is too laggy for gaming.

Airplay would be gaming + streaming. That's a heavy task even for gaming PCs (depending on the resolution)

This is completely unsurprising, who is the target customer here? Someone who knows about Death Stranding but doesn't have a PC or console to run it? Someone who loves Assassin's Creed UbiSlop so much that they want to play it on the train? All these games all but require actual controllers and have some level of commitment to them which limits where and when you can play them. I have no doubt there are people who have problems this solves but obviously it's not very many.

> We’d bet that Apple is paying Ubisoft, Capcom and 505 Games to port the titles over so that the tech giant can use them to showcase its latest devices

Lol, no way in hell Apple is paying them to port. At most they'd forgo some of the 25% App store revenue.

Apple always have a way in making their partners suckered into a bad deal. (Look at Goldman Sachs).

You can port the code but you can't port the experience.

It's touched on in the article, but I think by far the biggest problem with complex games on mobile platforms is the lack of a controller. And secondarily for phones, the tiny screen.

In some bizarro world where every iPhone had Switch-style joycons, these games would probably do very well.

I tried playing Death Stranding on my iPhone 15 Pro. It looked fantastic but those touchscreen controls were horrendous.

The backbone controller is quite nice, I enjoyed playing Death Stranding and Gears of War (cloud) on the iPhone.

Are they bluetooth, or can real Switch controllers be connected to a smartphone?

The games also run poorly on $1500 phones.

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