Who in the great merciful shit wants to play RE2 on ios?
Tablet as a display and a controller sounds like a workable solution.
There’s a lot going on here. I think other devs, Apple, and Google are all going to look at this and say it’s not the type of game people want on their phones, but I’d say that’s the wrong conclusion. If I got an APK included in the purchase of my PC games, I’d play a bunch more games on mobile, but even some of those that have mobile ports are no longer compatible with modern Android. Even some of those that still are compatible do not work with controllers, and many of those have bad touch controls. And if you narrow down that library of great games to the ones that still work and have good controls, it’s always an inferior version of the game by way of being the mobile version of it. There’s no easy standard to dock it like the Switch or to transfer saves like Steam cloud saves.
If you want this type of game to do well on mobile, Apple and Google need to make a standard, quality, easily portable mobile controller. Games need to support that controller more often than not. There needs to be a standard for docking the device and outputting to a larger screen. The device needs to retain compatibility with older software, reliably. This is at a minimum. But there isn’t really an incentive to make premium mobile gaming better, so they’ll stick with manipulative, low barrier to entry games that control well with touches, taps, and swipes.
So I’ll admit that it has been a couple decades since I played RE2, but I think there is some room to evaluate what kind of experience players are looking to get from that game and question how much overlap there is with mobile device usage.
When I think “mobile”, I think about games that I can play in a waiting room, on public transportation, in a break room at work, in a cafe between classes, etc. And I think about the games that work well in those situations. Turn-based puzzle games like Candy Crush or Sudoku. Idle games like Armory and Machine, Adventure Capitalist, Fallout Shelter, and Merchant. Even simple runner games.
These games cannot consume all of your attention- you need to still have some awareness of when your break is over, your name is called, or you have reached your stop. You don’t have a ton of time to catch up on what you did previously. You don’t have 15 minutes to spend getting used to controls. You probably don’t have a controller with you. You can’t afford to get into a long cutscenes. You need to be ready to put the game down at any moment.
So something like Resident Evil needs to be significantly re-designed to work. Horror in general is difficult because the player is probably in a well-lit room, possible with music playing, surrounded by other people having casual conversations. Resident Evil itself is particularly bad for this because it famously limits when and how much you can save. That whole system would need to be scrapped. We would need checkpoints at least every 15 minutes, probably more like 5. Any cutscenes need to be skippable and re-viewable from a menu.
There are certainly other situations where I could see it working. A camping trip, a long plane ride or airport layover, killing a few hours at a hotel, etc. I could install an android version onto my NVIDIA Shield, and it might be possible to do similar with a GoogleTV, Fire stick, or Apple TV hardware, although I would speculate most smart TV hardware would probably be too weak to run (cloud could be an option, but that’s already failed pretty hard). It would be cool to be able to play it in any room or out on my porch instead of being tethered to a living room TV.
The problem is those are incredibly niche use cases in comparison. I don’t think there is enough demand to justify Android and IOS ports. Other games sure- Pokemon would be perfect for mobile but Nintendo needs to keep it exclusive to their hardware to, well, sell their hardware. The Genesis classics are already on Android and a lot of them are great. But cinematic games designed around long play sessions just don’t translate well.
On my Steam Deck, or if you prefer a Switch, any game is a mobile game. You can suspend and resume quite easily, and as long as you can do the same on a phone, it’ll fit that use case just as well. My mobile use case might be killing 15 minutes at the DMV, or it might be an hour long train ride. I’ll pick the right game for the job.
Yeah I’ve had this problem recently. I bought limbo on steam to play on my steam deck. Recently realised there’s an android version but it seems like to use it on my phone I would have to buy the game again on Google play. Maybe I’m wrong about this, it seems to me that once you’ve bought a game in one format you should be able to download it in any format.
In an ideal world, every game should be fully cross-buy IMO, but that tends to never be the case.
PlayStation used to have PS3/PS4/PSVita cross-buy games for a while, but they didn’t keep it going for their recent PC porting efforts (that clearly wouldn’t help their bottom line).
Xbox has Play Anywhere, and that’s likely the closest to a functional cross-buy (and cross-play) we have today - that’s the main draw for me if (when) I ever buy games digitally on Xbox.
So the market and ecosystem would have to substantially change before these kinds of ports could ever become viable. I doubt any of that is likely to happen.
Maybe focus on a gaming oriented apple TV revision and sell it there at a competitive price
