Square Enix Wanted To Ship Over 5 Million Copies Of Tomb Raider

tomb raider shipments disappoint

Square Enix has now released a report on their financial earnings. We now know why Tomb Raider “under-performed”.

Tomb Raider sold over 3.4 million copies in its first month on sale. This might be impressive for most companies, but this was considered disappointing for Square Enix. This is because the company expected to ship between 5 – 6 million copies of the game.

This is some pretty high expectations considering Tomb Raider was sandwiched in between a very competitive month. The month of March alone saw the releases of God of War: Ascension, Gear of War: Judgment and BioShock: Infinite just to name a few.

In related news, Square Enix also expected to ship 4.5 to 5 million copies of Hitman: Absolution. The game only sold 3.6 million copies.

The only real disappointment is Sleeping Dogs. The company expected to ship between 2 – 2.5 million copies. The game sold just 1.75 million copies when it was released in August 2012.

3 thoughts on “Square Enix Wanted To Ship Over 5 Million Copies Of Tomb Raider

  1. 3 of them are great games.
    Pity ‘underperformed’ sales may prevent any kind of sequel.

  2. It is beyond me where the hell SquareEnix was thinking it was going to generate COD numbers here. Yet selling over 3.5 million copies in less then a month is a huge accomplishment in it’s own right and nothing to sneeze at. What this seems to me to be is that Square was expecting to offset it’s losses from Final Fantasy Online which of coarse was a massive failure. Yet it also highlights just how out of touch Square is with western markets these days. I don’t see how Tomb Raider is anything but a huge success. It has already in it’s short history outsold all of it’s previous ventures outside the original. It has receive almost universal acclaim and is among this year candidates for game of the year. What a slap in the fact to Crystal Dramatics which clearly has created among this year best titles. Only to be knocked down by a greedy publisher which thinks 3.5 million copies isn’t good enough lol. I really don’t understand the Japanese as they seem to never be satisfied with anything. Well at least when it comes to foreign properties as clearly Tomb Raider does not deserve such disrespect given it’s recent success. Time for some other publisher to pick it up which which can appreciate what the series has done and not based on it’s previous failures.

  3. The return on investment probably wasnt there. If the logic was that for every 1 dollar of advertising you spend, you make an additional 2 dollars. Then thats pretty good…

    But for every 1 dollar of advertising money you spend, you only make 50 cents. Then you are losing money on every advertising dollar….

    So advertising might boost sales, but not enough to cover the cost of advertising.

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