Last week, 2K Games did something unusual.
It re-released the critically acclaimed PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 game XCOM: Enemy Unknownon iOS. Against all conventional wisdom, it’s charging $19.99 for the game — much more expensive than your average iOS game.
XCOM for iPhone and iPad is many things. It’s a big-budget, modern mobile game at a relatively premium price point. It’s also a port to be proud of. If you’re an iPad owner and a strategy game fan, it’s one of the best games you can buy.
But above all else XCOM is the exception, not the rule.
This is an excellent port. The interface for the humans-versus-aliens turn-based strategy game has been redesigned from the ground up to work smoothly with touch, and it shows. Once you’ve memorized some of the trickier gestures, playing the game feels totally natural.
It’s not the best version of the game: Touch controls still just aren’t as quick or intuitive as a keyboard-and-mouse setup. And although this should probably go without saying, the game does look significantly better on PC and consoles. Even on a new iPad with a Retina display, XCOM looks roughly like a PlayStation 2 game.
Re-releasing XCOM for iOS was both a bold and sensible move. Even at its $20 price point, the game has managed to crack both the Top Paid and Top Grossing charts on the App Store, which means that it’s pulling in a great deal of money.
That doesn’t, however, mean that this is the beginning of the rise of $20 tablet games. Before 2K Games decided to bring XCOM to Apple devices, the game had long ago established itself on other platforms as both a commercial and critical success. The publisher knew it could safely sell the game for tablets at a premium price point because it already a proven hit.
XCOM already had a perfect combination of tablet-friendly gameplay and high popularity. This is not a situation that publishers of games often find themselves in.
There’s also an infrastructure problem facing other publishers of big games on mobile devices. Once installed, XCOM takes up 3.2 GB. If you’ve got a 16 GB or even 32 GB tablet, that’s a serious chunk of storage.
I don’t download music, movies or books to my iPad — I use Spotify, Netflix and a Kindle Paperwhite instead. But despite this, I’m down to just 1 GB of space left on my 16 GB iPad for all the games on there.
If even one more publisher decides to release a high-quality iOS port of a successful PC or console game, I’m going to have to ditch that XCOM install.
You will see a couple of other publishers use the success of the iOS version of XCOM as a justification for ports of their own titles. Future games from XCOM‘s developer Firaxis will almost certainly be designed from the beginning with the iPad in mind.
But, at least in the foreseeable future, these big releases will be few and far between. Free-to-play games about clashes of clans and crushings of candy are still the most successful types of titles on touchscreen devices, and that’s not changing soon.
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