Square-Enix Reveals Sales Expectations for Tomb Raider

Square-Enix has revealed exactly how many copies of Tomb Raider, Sleeping Dogs and Hitman it expected to sell, after announcing that they all failed to hit targets last month.

Astonishingly, the publisher hoped to sell between 5 and 6 million copies of Tomb Raider in its first month, which would have placed it amongst some of the fastest-selling games ever. It managed 3.6 million, which by most standards is an extremely impressive launch.

Hitman: Absolution and Sleeping Dogs also underperformed. "We were looking at selling roughly 2-2.5 million in the EU/NA market based on its game content, genre and Metacritic scores," reads the transcript of Square-Enix's latest financial briefing. "In the same way, game quality and Metacritic scores led us to believe that Hitman had potential to sell 4.5-5 million units, and 5-6 million units for Tomb Raider in EUR, NA and Japan markets combined."

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FY2013 was our first attempt to release hallmark Western titles like Hitman and Tomb Raider without releasing a blockbuster game in Japan.

The briefing outlines how much Square-Enix had riding on its Western-developed games in the last financial year. "FY2013 was our first attempt to release hallmark Western titles like Hitman and Tomb Raider without releasing a blockbuster game in Japan," it reads. "We put [a] considerable amount of effort in[to] polishing and perfecting the game content for these titles, receiving extremely high Metacritic scores. [Tomb Raider currently sits on 86, Hitman on 79.] However, we are very disappointed to see that high scores did not translate to actual sales performance."

What's more, those internal sales estimates were conservative: 80-90% of what the company believed was their true sales potential. The report cites the "huge slump" in North American video game sales as the main factor in this shortfall, though the European market was also "soft".

Yosuke Matsuda is taking over the Square-Enix President position from Yoichi Wada later this year in the wake of an "extraordinary loss" for the company. With such exceptionally high internal expectations, though, it seems almost inevitable that these games' performance has fallen short. The entire company will be reviewed in due course.

Keza MacDonald is in charge of IGN's games coverage in the UK. You can follow her on IGN and Twitter.

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