Square Enix has shed more light on its internal sales estimates for Tomb Raider, revealing the Japanese publisher expected the game to move excess of five-six million sales its first month.
Tomb Raider sold 3.4 million copies in four weeks; an impressive figure by anyone’s standards, but as you can now see, this fell short of internal expectations.
Considerably shorter, actually, as the five-six million mark is really “80-90 per cent” of what the publisher thought the game could actually achieve.
Tomb Raider wasn’t the only ‘commercial failure,’ though. Sleeping Dogs was expected to flog 2-2.5 million copies (it sold 1.75 million) and Hitman: Absolution’s 3.6 million fell short of its forecast of 4.5-5 million.
Speaking in a new statement issued this week, Square Enix commented: "We put a considerable amount of effort in polishing and perfecting the game content for these titles, receiving extremely high Metacritic scores," Square Enix said in a new financial statement.
"However, we were very disappointed to see that the high scores did not translate to actual sales performance, which is where we see the substantial variance in operation profit/loss against the forecast."
Has Square Enix expected too much of Tomb Raider and co.? Or do you think the games had the potential to reach their internal sales targets? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.