Capcom’s ambition to bring some of its big-hitting AAA games to mobile devices is certainly to be applauded. It’s a bold ambition, to see Resident Evil 7 on a tablet. So it’s a shame the project has been pretty disastrous, the games barely shifting any copies. And Capcom’s reaction? Make it far, far more inconvenient to play them.
If you are one of the [double-checks] two-thousand people who bought Resident Evil 7 for iOS devices by July this year, get ready to be even more annoyed as Capcom introduces an enforced online check before being willing to start the game.
As spotted by Eurogamer, iOS users on Reddit are reporting that as of the end of August, Capcom’s collection of Resident Evil 7, Resident Evil 4, and Resident Evil Village, are all now demanding an internet connection before loading, displaying the message in their update logs:
Due to changes to the startup process, an internet connection is now required when starting this app.
The same text appears on the games’ official site. People are understandably mad, swapping tips on how to seek refunds from Apple now the game is behind this peculiar restriction. However, Capcom has yet to explain why this change has been made. We’ve reached out to Capcom to ask.
Apple is understandably keen for people to realize that its current crop of iOS devices are astonishingly powerful gaming machines, capable of far more than merge games and match-3. Capcom is wisely seeking a different audience for its fantastic horror franchise, given the mobile machines are impressively capable of somewhat running the games. The issue is, no matter how often this has been tried over the years, there overlap on the Venn diagram for hardcore gamers and mobile players is razor-thin.
This is then exacerbated by the high prices for mobile games, with performance that’s not quite good enough, made far worse by touch controls being just the worst way to play such games. Hence RE7 apparently only managing to sell a measly $28,000-worth according to a July 16 MobileGamer.biz report. (RE4 reportedly managed to convert 7,000 people to a full copy of the game, while Village managed a terrible 5,700 payments of $15.)
So responding to this lack of success by introducing a cumbersome internet requirement is bewildering. While we don’t know a motivation, it’s hard to imagine one other than a form of DRM—perhaps a misguided belief that evil piracy is to blame for no one wanting to play a game in the most inconvenient way possible.
But given most of the very small audience will be wanting to play these games on their iPads, and most of those people won’t have a SIM card in their iPad, you’ve just made playing the not-great game on the go a whole heap of tedium. Who is going to bother setting up a hotspot, or trying to find a passing wifi connection? And, like all forms of DRM, it will of course only affect the people who paid the full $20 for the game, and not anyone who might have found a way to less legally procure it. May as well play some more Royal Kingdom.
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