“Assassin’s Creed Visions” will be available on iPhone 15 Pro in early 2024, which means that iPhone is becoming an emerging native 3A gaming platform to compete with PCs and consoles.
AAA games refer to those games that have invested the most time and money in production. They are the crown jewels of electronic games. Take Sony’s “The Last of Us 2” as an example. The production cost of this game was as high as 220 million US dollars, and it took more than 200 employees 5 years to complete. If marketing costs are included, the investment may be as high as 3 before the game is released. One hundred million U.S. dollars.
In the past, games costing hundreds of millions of dollars could only appear on PCs or game consoles with leading performance, and only such devices could bring a reliable gaming experience. For mobile phones, it is not easy to run a 3A game, and it is not a priority platform for 3A game developers.
Apple is trying to tear down this barrier.
The first is performance.
Although the theory of excessive performance of smartphones has existed for a long time, no one seems to have questioned the excessive performance of PCs, because everyone knows that even if the performance of CPU and graphics card increases, the latest 3A game masterpieces will quickly eat up these performances. This is Andy and Bill’s law. It is always the software that determines the upper limit of hardware performance.
Apple equipped the iPhone 15 Pro with the industry’s first 3nm process chip, which significantly enhanced GPU performance and supported hardware acceleration, ray tracing and other technologies. Information from Apple’s official website shows that the A17 Pro’s graphics processor is faster than the iPhone 12 Pro The speed increase is up to 70%.
If this comparison is not intuitive enough, you might as well take a look at the minimum hardware requirements for the PC version of “Assassin’s Creed Visions”: Intel i5 processor, NVIDIA GTX 1060, 8GB RAM, and 70GB hard drive space. The recommended requirements are: GTX 1080. In other words, the graphics performance of the iPhone 15 Pro has reached the level of a mid-range gaming PC.
In fact, in addition to “Assassin’s Creed Visions”, familiar 3A games on PC and PS5 such as “Castle 4 Remastered”, “Castle: Village” and “Death Stranding” will also be available on iPhone. These works have previously been Having already installed Mac computers equipped with M-series chips, porting iPhones is not a big problem. This is also one of the benefits of Apple’s own development of chips.
Apple’s software and hardware ecosystem, ranging from Apple TV and iMac to iPad and iPhone, is building a gaming platform that can take into account multiple scenarios with screens of different sizes as the core.
More importantly, there are advantages in distribution pipelines.
Apple has 2 billion active devices and 1 billion service subscription users, which is twice the number of registered users of Steam, and more than five times the current game consoles of Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo combined. It is undoubtedly the most played game in the world. The “game console” is also the most influential game distribution channel.
If a game is only released on Mac, there will probably be only a few users, but once it is added to the iOS family bucket, it means that it will reach the widest user group. With the iteration of chip performance, more and more iPhones will be able to run 3A games, and no game manufacturer will ignore the iPhone as a pipeline.
The promotion of hardware upgrades is bound to change the gaming experience. In fact, in the past few years, gaming experiences that combine home and mobile outings are leading the wave of changes in gaming business models.
Due to high development costs, AAA games have long pursued a buyout system. This is a high-risk, high-reward business that is incompatible with the free-to-play F2P mobile game operating model.
However, the rise of the cross-platform model of high-quality games represents the formation of a new mobile game business model. There have been many cases proving that there are huge success opportunities hidden between the development specifications of AAA games and the free-to-play F2P operating model.
You can play “Fortnite” on all major gaming platforms. The game has more than 350 million registered users and has generated more than $9 billion in revenue for Epic in the past two years.
MiHoYo, which appeared at the Apple press conference, also adopted similar high-standard development and multi-platform operation strategies for its “Genshin Impact” and “Honkai: Star Rail”. While achieving success, it also proved that this feasibility of this business model in China.
Following closely behind, Chinese game companies such as Tencent and NetEase are also actively developing cross-platform games for global distribution, treating PC, consoles and mobile phones as equally important distribution channels.
Just as mobile games are becoming AAA, AAA games are also becoming “mobile.”
After the Nintendo Switch sold 100 million units, no one would question that it was a mistake to use a game console that caters to multiple scenarios. In fact, game consoles with better performance are becoming a trend.
The higher-performance handheld console SteamDeck has sold millions of units and attracted investment from traditional PC manufacturers such as Asus and Lenovo, proving that the demand for playing AAA games anytime and anywhere does exist.
Interestingly, many media such as VGC and Eurogamer stated that at the recent Cologne Games Show in Germany, Nintendo showed the media subsequent new Switch models and ran “The Matrix” developed by Unreal 5. To some extent, it also proves that 3A games are moving out of the living room and extending to more scenes.
Since the birth of the iPhone, the question of which one is better between mobile games and console games has been an ever-present issue. From players to manufacturers, from gameplay to business models, both sides have different opinions and endless debates.
But when it comes to your iPhone, or maybe your next PS5, when mobile games and 3A games are all competing on the same screen.
It’s time to get off the field and have a fight.
