Apple showcased forthcoming Tencent title Honor of Kings World and continued to push its poorly-received console ports in its keynote yesterday.
Tencent game Honor of Kings World appears to be an open world action-adventure game set in the HoK universe. It is coming to iPhone next year, said Apple’s VP of iPhone product marketing Kaiann Drance. It was first announced two years ago, with the first official gameplay revealed in November 2022.
Apple also claimed that its new A18 chip, which powers the new iPhone 16 range, “delivers up to 30% higher sustained performance for gaming”. War Thunder Mobile, which was released in July 2023, was used to demo the new phone’s ray tracing capabilities.
The forthcoming iOS ports of Resident Evil 2 and Sniper Elite 4 were also briefly shown as part of what Apple called its range of “console-level games for iPhone”, but no release dates for those titles were confirmed.
There was also no mention of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which Apple said in its last keynote would be launching alongside the console and PC versions later this year. We’ve asked Ubisoft and Apple for more details on this and will update this story if or when they reply.
The tech giant said that its new iPhone 16 range is capable of playing the likes of Resident Evil 4, 7 and Village, plus Assassin’s Creed Mirage. These titles were only playable on the iPhone 15 Pro and Max models previously.
Another port already on the market, Death Stranding, was also demoed during the iPhone 16 Pro/Max section of the keynote to show the devices’ capabilities.
Apple’s VP Drance added that titles like Death Stranding, Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Resident Evil 2, 4 and 7, Sniper Elite 4 and Honor of Kings World “take iPhone gaming to the next level”.
But as we’ve reported previously, those Assassin’s Creed, Resident Evil and Death Stranding ports have already proven to be very poor performers.
Appfigures estimates we published back in June suggested that fewer than 3,000 people had paid $49.99 to play Assassin’s Creed Mirage on iPhone. The same data firm also estimated that after six months on the market, only around 7,000 people had paid to unlock the full edition of Resident Evil 4.
Resident Evil Village fared even worse, with around 5,750 paying players. 505 Games’ Death Stranding had attracted roughly 10,600 downloads at $20 since it launched on January 29 2024, totalling around $212k in revenue.
We later ran the numbers on Resident Evil 7, too. At the time of publication in July, Resident Evil 7 had attracted fewer than 2,000 paying customers, according to Appmagic data.
