Important caveat: I’m assuming the above are accurate. This isn’t necessarily because it appears the primary source is an Analytics company called Appfigures, and looking at their website they do a lot of modeling and extrapolation to get their numbers. The more of those you stack on top of each other the larger the error bars get, so take all of the following with the appropriate helping of salt.
All that said, woof. Even they’re wrong and the real numbers are a full order of magnitude higher, still woof. I sure hope Capcom, Ubisoft, and 505 Games got huge payouts from Apple to subsidize these ports, because those numbers are awful. Even as ports of preexisting games that simply added platforms these still had to be huge money losers. There’s no way they came even close to breaking even.
That said, I also can’t say I’m the least bit surprised. For starters, the addressable audience simply wasn’t very big. You’re limited to either an iPhone 15 Pro or an M1 or later iPad (so 2021 Pro or 2022 Air or later, with no base iPad or iPad mini able to run them). On top of that they made no effort to adapt to touchscreens (not that I’m convinced that was even realistically possible for games with such complex multi-input controls). It’s controller or bust. End result is even if you had phenomenal sell through to your potential audience the total numbers simply aren’t there.
On top of that, performance simply wasn’t there. I’ve followed the various Digital Foundry overviews of these (and summarized them here) and quite simply the A17 wasn’t up to the task. At their very best they qualified as barely playable, with uneven frame rates, dodgy frame pacing, very low resolutions depending on upscaling which only partially solved things, and at times horrible controller lag. The M-series systems fared considerably better, even the M1 (which surprised me, I’d have thought three generations of architectural advancements would cover up for two fewer CPU P-cores and three fewer GPU cores), and were a credible experience, although still with reduced fidelity compared to even the PS4 versions.
Finally, who wants to play these games on an iPhone? Resident Evil loses almost all its atmosphere on such a small screen and Baghdad’s vistas have no sense of grandeur. An iPad, especially one of the 13” models, fares better, but it’s still a decidedly lesser experience compared to a TV or even decent sized monitor. I’ve harped on game selection before, but it still remains true.
And of course I’ve ignored the economics of trying to sell premium priced games in the F2P cesspool that is the App Store, but that obviously had an enormous impact as well.
So yeah. Impressive tech demos as a show of capabilities, but as actual ways to play the games there’s little or nothing to recommend them. I do wonder what the actual expectations were for sales numbers though. I have little doubt this was still a clean limbo right under them, but it would be interesting to see what they thought they’d get.
But, even after all that, it’s really missing the most important question by far: how did the Mac versions do? For all the reasons above these were simply never going to sell well; that result was well and truly overdetermined. But except for RE Village, which hit the Mac first, and AC Mirage, which bafflingly was iOS/iPadOS only (an oversight they’re fixing with Shadows), these are all cross-buy with the Mac version. And it’s the Mac that has actual potential. I’ve said before that I still find it utterly bizarre how much of an orphan Mac gaming is given its customer base. As PC gaming in general sees a resurgence, consoles become specialized PCs (even including an APU approach very similar to Apple Silicon complete with unified memory), and multi platform releases based on middleware to maximize potential audience it still feels to me like the Mac should represent an untapped but potentially sizable audience. Despite the iOS ports crashing and burning, if the Mac releases sold even respectably then there remains at least some potential.
