Pre-order 'Resident Evil 4' for iPhone, iPad, or Mac today, pay $60 at launch for full unlock

Soo... shareware. We are back at shareware ; )

AppleInsider said:

A section of the game will be playable for free. Resident Evil 4 is $60 since it is a new game, and that's the same price as on PlayStation and Xbox.

Resident Evil Village was originally released in 2021, so it's priced a little lower at $39.99. However, that's a little more expensive than the Mac version, which currently costs $29.99 as a separate purchase.

I think they will struggle to sell at that price on mobile but it's understandable why they'd price it like that. Mario Run had over 300 million downloads and they said about 5% of people paid, which is a standard IAP purchase rate. The price was $10 so they get $7 = $105m (over multiple years). For Nintendo who makes $10b+ per year, that's not much. Capcom makes around $1b per year so that result would be ok for a port.

They won't get 300m+ downloads for Resident Evil because it's only compatible with newer phones. By the time it launches next month, there will only be around 10m iPhones capable of playing it and only a fraction of those will buy it. If half those devices download it with 5% paying x $60 * 0.7 = $10m.

Over the course of a year, it will grow to around 70m capable of running it, 35m downloads x 5% x $60 * 0.7 = $73m.

iPads and Macs capable of playing it will be around 100-200m so they might drive more sales than iPhone initially. 1m purchases on both would be $120m x 0.7 = $84m.

In general, I think big publishers should price mobile games at half of what the desktop/console version is and if people want to cross-purchase, charge the difference. If someone buys on iPhone, charge $30, then if they want to play on Mac, deduct $30 off the $60 Mac price. The mobile gaming audience is much bigger than other platforms at 3 billion and are more willing to buy in-game items than upfront items. They can have purchases for the in-game currency for weapons, health etc, $1 = 10,000 credits.

Maybe they will launch with a half-price Halloween sale just for that launch week to see what the numbers are like. Hopefully they won't be put off by the low initial sales on mobile due to the limited amount of hardware capable of running the games. In a couple of years, the capable iPhone devices will reach over 250m.

beowulfschmidt said:

I can see playing such a game on an iPad or a Mac, but I don't see people willingly paying $60 to play even Resident Evil on a phone screen, especially since most games on iOS are a few dollars at most.  Or at least not in numbers that make it profitable.  Of course, RE on iOS is a port of the console and/or PC version, so it's probably already recovered its development cost.

I just don't see phones as a AAA game platform being any more than, "yeah, we'll see what we can do after we make all our money off of consoles and PCs.  Maybe."

$60 for universal unlock on Mac/iPad/iPhone is a good deal if all your Apple hardware is capable of running the game. I can see myself trying it out even though the last time I played an RE game was the original Gamecube version of RE 4.