Square Enix Release Tomb Raider’s Sales Expectations

Square Enix has revealed the sales expectations for last month’s Tomb Raider reboot developed by Crystal Dynamics.

The Final Fantasy publisher hoped to have sold between 5 and 6 million copies of the game within the first month of release. Had Tomb Raider sold that much, it would have taken a place amongst the fastest-selling games ever right up there with Activision’s Call of Duty mega-franchise. Instead, Tomb Raider managed to ship 3.6 million in it’s first months, a number many publishers can only wish for. However, as revealed last month, Square considers it a failure.

Square Enix’s last two big Western games, Hitman Absolution and Sleeping Dogs also under performed according to Square. The sales figures for these games were estimated to be 4-4.5 million and 2-2.5 million respectively.

The expectations for all three games are based upon Square’s lower estimate of 80-90 per cent of the games sales potential.

In the latest financial statement, Square explained “We put a considerable amount of effort in polishing and perfecting the game content for these titles, receiving extremely high Metacritic scores. 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.”