In a surprising move, Apple announced last year that its iPhone 15 Pro models would be able to support full-blown AAA console titles, partnering with the likes of Capcom to bring current-gen games to the mobile platform. Despite a less-than-stellar commercial reception, Capcom appears to be making its iOS ports even less enticing – now forcing all of its Resident Evil games to require an internet connection to play.
Taking to Twitter, Capcom announced an update to its Resident Evil games on iOS, saying “iPhone/iPad/Mac players. New patches are available for Resident Evil 4, Resident Evil 7 Biohazard, and Resident Evil Village. Please update the games via the App Store.”
While patches are typically seen as a positive, in this case you might want to hold off on updating, as in reading the patch notes it can be seen that the main addition with this update is an added form of DRM, with Resident Evil 7, RE4 and Village now requiring an internet connection to launch, stating:
“Due to changes to the startup process, an internet connection is now required when starting this app.”
While in no way the first mobile game to require such a connection, all of the Capcom games released on iOS so far are single player affairs, and so necessitating an internet connection to launch makes little in the way of any sense – unless the publisher is doing so to gather additional data.
As mentioned in the past, the AAA games ported to iPhones so far have not performed the best sales-wise, with the Resident Evil games in particular having seemingly sold fewer than 100,000 copies in total so far – in the best-case scenario.
As such, it is possible that Capcom are doing whatever they can to try and recoup costs – even if it seemingly means analysing your game data. It’ll be interesting to see how fans react to this change.
KitGuru says: What do you think of this patch? Will you refrain from updating? Why do you think Capcom has done this? Let us know down below.