Except the price and age of the game is probably the culprit.
You price these hot new (or semi-old) AAA titles at $10, and they will all sell almost the same (I'll be generous and give it ~10K copies more). The market isn't nurtured to buying videogames outright, rather go Freemium to nickel and dime every user and concentrate on metrics like ARPU.
You’re thinking about yourself “if you can afford” is not how the younger consumer think, rather “why would I spend $500 on a machine, which I will barely use and I have to sit down, tethered to a TV, when I already own a phone / tablet / laptop?”
When you’re in high school or college, $500 is a lot more than you think.
The bare minimum target hardware in discussion here is $1200. Once again, the kind of younger customer who can afford a $1200 flagship Apple phone, can also afford a $400 PS5 or a $300 Series S or even a $500 Series X, and a monitor ($200 4K monitors). $600/$700 hardware investment for 7 years or an entire console generation isn't out of the ordinary for a student.
The kind of people who play games on their phone give fuck all about graphics and frame rate. Most people would be impressed by it.
And I can quote 140+ million Switch users who could give two less fucks about performace in their games.
They're not buying fully priced games (most of them, on average) because the random 3rd party Switch port by Saber Interactive was an impossible port and to glaze at their work. The digital foundry pixel counting perf measuring tech nerds don't even make up for 3-5% of sales data.
They buy them, because they can and it's their dedicated gaming hardware of choice. The point is that most customers don't buy current year flagship phones to buy and play modern AAA games. If they want to play them, they most probably have dedicated hardware in the form of a PC or a current generation console for that purpose.
Remember there is a very large audience who would rather play Fortnite or CoD mobile than play it on a console/PC just for extra frames or better graphics.
No one is disputing that the F2P/Freemium market, which started, perpetuated and popularized on mobile, is making the most revenue, on mobile (Fortnite still makes most on Console/PC, but the fact remains that mobile is still the biggest market for F2P/Freemium in general).
It really is that people don't want to pay for games on mobile because they have been trained not to. Square tried breaking into mobile phone gaming over and over again and they still can't do it.
This thread and this whole discussion is about Console/PC AAA games on mobile. Square hasn't released a contemporary AAA game on mobile at all, let alone simultaneous launch windows with Console/PC.
All their fully paid releases on Android/iOS have been their back catalogue from Gen 5 consoles (or prior), cut down/scaled back versions of their AAA releases (like FFXV Pocket Edition) or just outright F2P/P2W crap like FFVII Ever Crisis or genre switch baits like FFXV: A New Empire and War for Eos, disguised as 4X Strategy outings, filled with IaP's to progress. Same shit with many other IP's like Octopath Traveller as well.
They know for a fact that new AAA games won't sell on mobile and aren't risking porting/wasting resources. F2P/P2W/Gacha/IaP's/Microtransactions and legacy back catalogue relying on nostalgia PR ("Oh hey! Look! It's your favorite Final Fantasy/Chrono Trigger/Secret of Mana games from the PS1/SNES era! We hope you buy these again and support us!") is how they operate on mobile, and how they will in the future too.
Mario Kart Tour got 240 million downloads, and that game runs worse and looks worse than Mario Kart 8/Deluxe.
Yet, it will make more than 10x the money through IaP's and microtransactions, over a full fledged port of MK8 to mobile, will do in it's lifetime. Nintendo knows their target audience more than anyone else in the industry. They want the microtransactions pie and traditional exclusive pie that they've cultivated an audience, for decades. It's the reason why you see them very slow (only 3 games/IP's till now on mobile) in releasing their mobile Freemium games, because they don't want the adverse feedback from mobile customers to affect their console PR, especially now during the transition over to a new gen.
but why pay $400 more for one or 2 games when you can play them perfectly fine on your tv with your iphone?
1. If you can afford a $1200 iPhone, you can afford a $400 console or a (slightly more expensive) PC, which can play modern AAA games.
2. Library of more than 10-20K games on PS5/Xbox (backwards compatibility included) and even more on PC (Steam + GOG + itch.io) vs 5 games so far on iOS. You tell me who in the right mind who's interested in wanting a platform to play modern games, will go "Aha! Let me buy the iPhone 15 Pro for $1200 with 5 games over a library of 20K+ games on Console/PC! That is a perfectly rational purchasing decision!"
RE8 looks amazing for a device that fits in your pocket and its only going to get better.
Yes. RE8 looks amazing on the Steam Deck OLED (still not good as the PS4 version though), and it's only going to get better with the Steam Deck 2 and the Switch 2, next year.
the hard truth is mobile devices are closing in on game consoles faster than game copnsoles are evolving.
The actual cold hard truth is that a 11 year old home console in the PS4, still shits on (almost, except for maybe the highest end handheld PC's from ASUS, ONE X, MSI etc,) all mobile devices in the market currently in new and old games, and this is par for the course. Mobile tech catching up or even trying to, against dedicated Console/PC hardware, even after a decade, has always been the norm. There is no need to be upset.
You can still be excited about the upcoming iPhone 16 Pro and it's new A18 Pro SoC, or the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 that is yet to be announced in a few months, judge the device on it's merit i.e. actual performance, than how you "feel" about it. The stats don't lie. The numbers don't lie. Moore's Law is not a myth. As of now, in July 2024, no phone (whether flagship or not) has beaten last gen home console hardware, in performance or the sheer library of games they have, and that is a cold hard fact. Whether this changes in the future (especially the library part since it requires effort from publishers, more than performance, because that is natural) is yet to be seen.
It's just that the platform holders are now requesting (or even paying acclaimed developers sometimes for good PR for other publishers to invest) AAA publishers to port their newest games on to mobile to expand the market and wanting to slice that Console/PC revenue pie.
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