This could end up being a truly historic year for the fighting game genre. Street Fighter 6 is set to break new ground in June, meabwhile Tekken 8 is slowly creeping up from the horizon. Mortal Kombat 12 might even rear its head later this year, according to the latest Warner Bros. financial earnings call. While Mortal Kombat 12 is sure to be just as big a hit as its last few entries, it wouldn't harm NetherRealm to get the game in the hands of as many players as possible - including on the mobile market.
Mobile gaming is just as tumultuous as ever, on one hand flooded with lazy titles that don't even pretend they're not designed to take the consumer's money. But on the other, the mobile market has seen some real gems appear over the last year or so, including games like Vampire Survivors and Marvel Snap. Regardless of its general perception, the mobile market is still massive, and a Mortal Kombat 12 port only stands to add more fans to the long-running fighting game franchise.
Mortal Kombat 12 Should Come With Its Own Mobile Port
In April 2015, a mobile version of Mortal Kombat X launched a week before the mainline entry. While it shared the same name, sound elements, and character models as Mortal Kombat X, this mobile version was fairly different in a few regards - in particular, its gameplay. As opposed to the usual Mortal Kombat gameplay formula where players input specific button presses to execute deliberate combos, Mortal Kombat X on mobile featured a more streamlined system where the player simply needed to swipe and tap the screen to deal damage.
Over the years, Mortal Kombat X received a number of updates adding iconic characters, and with its February 2019 update, the game was renamed to Mortal Kombat Mobile. Generally speaking, Mortal Kombat Mobile is a solid mobile fighter, albeit an incredibly simplistic one. Though it lacks a lot of the series' intricate features, Mortal Kombat Mobile does a solid job of giving fans their on-the-go fighting game fix with plenty of room for improvement.
Mobile gaming technology has come quite a long way in the last few years, allowing for more advanced and complex ports of popular titles. Just last year, Apex Legends came to mobile platforms (short-lived as that may be), and Call of Duty Mobile has been a similarly impressive experience separate from its console counterparts. Not to mention games like Genshin Impact that are stuffed to the prim with content across an open-world setting. With these advances in technology, it seems fair to say that NetherRealm could create a fully realized mobile port of Mortal Kombat 12, this time being a one-to-one adaptation that fans deserve.
While another Mortal Kombat Mobile reskin for the next generation of the franchise would be fine, a full port of Mortal Kombat 12 could end up bringing the series' beloved gameplay to an even wider audience able to take the proper Mortal Kombat experience on the go. With NetherRealm currently at work on Mortal Kombat: Onslaught, a "cinematic" RPG solely designed for phones, it's clear the developer cares about the mobile market. Thus, a true port of Mortal Kombat 12 to those devices doesn't seem like a bad idea.
Mortal Kombat 12 is in development.