Sales of Rise of the Tomb Raider are appalingly bad

@mike: The most sensible thing to me would be to hang onto it until January.

@dudeglove: I've seen a ton of promotion for it. They even played the trailer with Karen O's original song as part of the trailers when I went to see Bond. In stark contrast I've seen relatively little marketing for Fallout 4.

The real tragedy here is that all personal preference aside, Tomb Raider is an unquestionably better made game than Fallout and yet it won't sell even marginally as well. People love their big open world games it seems, warts and all. I assume it's the minecraft generation growing up and seeking that same open world experience with a bit more meat and maturity to it.

@humanity: Why would it be the Minecraft generation? Why wouldn't it be the same people who've been buying the same game Bethesda have been pushing since Morrowind came out? Surely the Minecraft generation are still mostly playing Minecraft?

I reckon for most this will probably be a Xmas gift. Like myself ive asked for this for Xmas, as i've already shilled out for Halo 5, Fallout and Battlefront in the last month. Just Case 3 will probably be a xmas gift too.

The lesson Square-Enix business will see: "Nobody wants this Tomb Raider crap, shut it down!"

Actual lesson: "Poor business decisions (release date, 'exclusive' platform) have killed a great game."

Last time around they were 'disappointed' in sales despite being one of the only huge selling and profit making titles in their recent portfolio, because they burdened it with making up for their failing Japanese development costs. Moronic.

if microsoft kills this awesome franchise I will be unhappy

Given the factors, (only on Xbox Consoles, out Firday not Tuesday, digital sales not counted, possibly other places sales not counted, I don't think sales from SquareEnix's site were tracked and thats where I got mine from), and how it's doing compared to the last game, I don't think it's actually doing that badly. I also saw next to no marketing for the game, be it TV, Magazines or Newspapers. Most other Xbox One owners I know were also planning in picking it up either after they finished with Fallout 4 or around Christmas, so I'd also wager there's plenty of other factors that make this number actually make sense.

Seems a little soon to be making that claim. There really isn't a lot of data there.

I wonder how long this strategy is going to work in the future. I don't have an XBO so I just watched a play through on Twitch. It looks fine, but now I have no desire to bother with it when it comes out on PC

there have been tons of commercials for it on . ive seen internet ads in tons of places.

tomb raider was a main sponsor for rousey/holm

@jesus_phish: Well yeah of course a large part of the install base is still composed of core fans, but I think there is a tendency in the younger audience to go for these big games where you can spend hundreds of hours wandering around - a bigger emphasis on quantity over quality. It's just something I've been thinking about lately, sorry if it sounded like I was claiming this as concrete fact as that wasn't my intention.

I wouldn't mind if this series died and went away forever.

Hope the sales are shit on PS4 and PC, too! I wanna see Crystal Dynamics do something new.

Square Enix shot themselves in the foot releasing against Fallout 4 and Battlefront. On top of that, the whole Xbox One exclusivity deal was a bad idea from the start. Not only does that gimp the sales on other consoles for almost a year, but unless you are in North America, the Xbox One might as well not exist since the market share is so small compared to the PS4 and PC. Just a bad deal all the way around, which is a shame.

Hopefully when the other versions release we'll see a nice sales jump. From everything I've heard the game sounds fantastic so I really do hope it sells enough to justify continuing the series.

Nobody should really be shocked if the numbers are low. That tends to happen when you tether yourself exclusively to a struggling console and come out in the middle of a busy holiday season. I hope the game does well though as I enjoyed the first and look forward to playing this one on a PS4 sometime down the line.

Launching it next to Fallout 4 was a bad idea. This is even more of a bummer though, cause not only do I love Tomb Raider more than Fallout 4, but it might be in my top three of the year. Such a great game and having it do so poorly is so depressing.

Oh right, they made a new Tomb Raider. The fact that I forgot it even existed is kind of telling.

@bradbrains: I'm in the UK, and admittedly don't watch that much TV, but their week of release I saw ads for Fallout 4, but nothing for Tomb Raider at all :\

Keep in mind that Square Enix was disappointed by the sales of the last entry. Who knows if we even would've gotten this game without Microsoft's financial support.

It's unfortunate but we live in time where publishers are so risk-averse (by necessity to a large degree) that even games with huge name recognition like Tomb Raider or Street Fighter aren't getting made without these sorts of deals.

Wow. Why the Tomb Raider hate?

Totally. Bring on Gex 4!

Just kidding. Shame to see this game do poorly, planning on picking it up soon.

That would be a shame, because it's a great game from what I've played. I had a blast with the reboot though so it's basically more like that which isn't a bad thing. Still, with that awkward release date and being Xbox One only was going to affect it. I expect it'll do better with the PC and PS4 releases.

Square Enix is mostly to blame for what has happend to the latest tomb raider game. The first tomb raider sold millions of copies but for Square Enix that wasnt good enough.

Square Enix got greedy and did a timed exclusivity agreement with Microsoft. So instead of releasing the sequel to all platforms at the same time it became tied to a gaming platform which has been losing in sales to ps4. So as a result the deal reduced the amount of potential buyers of the game.

As if this wasnt enough they released the new tomb raider at the same time that fallout 4 was released. This failure of sales is really not that hard to figure out once you add these two things together. The most frustrating thing is that the new tomb raider game is a pretty good game. I actually stopped playing fallout 4 so I could play through the newest tomb raider.

Square Enix should be very ashamed at the moment. They just probably ruined tomb raider as a franchise.

From what I understand a lot of publishers depend on the profit of their larger games to finance smaller projects. Without that cash flow, they wouldn't have enough money to make the other, less profitable game games. I believe someone sent and email to the Bombcast about this a while ago.

The UK has the highest rate of Xbox owners in the world.

The Xbox has never been a very good global console. Even in the 360 era, US/UK sales for the Xbox could always generally be relied upon to be the total sales for a game, since few people outside of those regions actually owned a 360. The Ps3 actually outsold the 360 by quite a large margin, and was the clear "winner" of last generation due to this as well. It's just something nobody noticed thanks to the fact the Xbox had such a stranglehold on the US/UK.

In this generation, the US has become another Ps4 stronghold. In the US, the rate of Ps4 v One ownership is last I checked, 3 : 1. For the rest of the world, it varies between 5 : 1 to 10 : 1. The UK is the only real Xbox focused region, having a 1.5 : 1 conversion rate in favor of the Xbox.

If this only sold 60k in the UK, it's not going to be selling gangbusters anywhere else. Global sales are very likely under the 200k mark, and I'm being generous and assuming a lot of US gamers kept their 360's, and are ok with slightly downgraded graphics.

The question that actually needs to be asked is how much this matters of Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix. Even though this will be coming out on the PC and Ps4 in the future, initial monthly sales are what matter when it comes to creating a sequel. Square Enix executives cannot look at the calendar and say "Well, let's wait for Holiday 2016 before we think about making the next Tomb Raider", they need to make that decision now, based off the information they have in front of them. Crystal Dynamics needs to start working on a new game now, either a new LoK game, Tomb Raider 3, or even a new IP. And to do that, Square Enix needs to believe they can make them money if they finance a new game from Crystal Dynamics.

Just off very basic theorycrafting, Microsoft would have needed to spend between 40 million to 50 million to have made this worthwhile to Square Enix. I doubt they did ( they paid 50 million for GTAIV, they likely paid 20-30 million tops of Rise. ). I imagine Square Enix will eventually recoup the costs of this when they release the PC and Ps4 editions, but I doubt this will ever actually really be a super profitable game.

The worry now is how Square Enix responds to this.

Just remember that Square Enix redid its Final Fantasy XIV mmo. The original release was so bad that Square Enix had to redo almost all of the game (which took at least 2 years). Who knows how much money they spent in order to make Final Fantasy XIV a game that people wanted to play.

According to figures that I found Final fantasy 13 sold:

• Final Fantasy XIII: 6.5 million
• Final Fantasy XIII-2: 3.1 million
• Lightning Returns Final Fantasy XIII: 1.4 million

http://www.craveonline.com/culture/761749-final-fantasy-13-trilogy-shipped-11-million-copies

In comparison the new tomb raider reboot sold 8.5 million copies

http://www.pcgamer.com/tomb-raider-reboot-has-sold-85-million-copies/

So one could ask why is the new tomb raider considered a disappointment by Square Enix. After all their own flag pole products havent sold that well either and final fantasy 14 mmo was a severe resource drain for multiple years when it was redone.

Well, they had an unfortunate release date, and went with the wrong console to be (timed) exclusive on.

Cry me a damn river squeenix.

Just don't release on the same day as Horizon Zero Dawn. I think that is a holiday 2016 release also.

yea fallout got way more. they were doing fallout ads after fallout ads

@nardak: I think it was a disappointed because of what they projected for sales numbers rather than in comparision to what they did previously

@nardak: Remember that development costs would have been SIGNIFICANTLY lower for the FFXIII sequels because they were both running on XIII's already ready engine, and also using a ton of assets already available. Also if your point is that they sunk money into redoing FFXIV, FFXIII really doesn't matter that much at all.

Redoing it for FFXIV was kind of a gamble, but they did it I think because FFXI (their last MMO), made them the most money out of any game with its monthly subscriptions, so if they could get a decent number of subs, they'd be making bank. And oh hey, FFXIV now has close on (or maybe more than) 5 mil subs, quite close to WoW at this point, and I think in the long run may overtake WoW (except when expansions come out for WoW, sub numbers suddenly inflate to double their normal amount).

Not that it wasn't kinda shitty for SE to say that TR2013 was a disappointment, but given that they were midway in investing in FFXIV and FFXV I'm not too surprised if they were a bit easily frustrated.

More on point, I think releasing on same day as Fallout 4 is far less important to sales than nobody owns a fucking Xbox 1. Did Fallout 4 have an effect on day 1 sales? Undoubtedly; but this just pales in comparison to the ROTTR being currently an Xbone exclusive and it's going to sell a lot better when it's on PC and PS4. For me and other people, TR2013 was a way to have an Uncharted style game on PC where you could see a really good looking game looking even better at 1080p and 60fps.

@dudeglove: I don't mind that generation either, play what you like I always say, but as a big fan of this new rebooted Tomb Raider I think it's a shame that it's struggling to find footing and honestly I'm not quite sure why. Apart from a crowded release window it seems like most people still pass it up as a game they'll get down the road on sale. While the Uncharteds of the world still bring in huge fanfare and excitement, Tomb Raider is existing on the periphery of that success. Good reviews, good word of mouth, yet it still doesn't seem to be translating into spectacular sales - good sales for sure, but not the runaway success that I think it deserves.

Of course thats a lot of "I think" and "in my opinion" strewn in there.

PC ppl are waiting for the January release of the game and PS4 folk are playing other stuff.
Wonder how much MS paid for the timed exclusive.

With the sheer number of people who have flat out said they are not buying it till it is on a discounted price, this is no shock. Just sad. This is what happen with the first one. Great game, that was reviewed as such, but no one bought it till the huge sales on pc and current gen systems.

I imagine it had a lot to do with the contract they had with MS and the exclusivity deal. I think all involved would say that it was a dumb deal and nobody should have ever done it.

It's proof that MS regrets it in some of the things they have said about no longer pursuing timed exlcusives and instead focusing on their own productions.

Nah.

With MS publishing, they were likely the ones in charge of when the game came out, and they wanted it to be this Christmas so they would have a holiday title to push sales of the console.

Exactly what I think. And yes, the game will do just fine. Don't worry.

If a game, at initial release, does really poorly why would he assume it'd somehow do much better a year from now?

And I'm not sure where he would get internal sales numbers as a 3rd party. Especially when Tomb Raider is 4th on the sales charts in the UK. And the UK isn't all of a game's sales, why ignore the rest of the world?

Seems like a snarky way to go about this. Don't celebrate a game's poor sales (which I'm not sure about) and then assure everyone they'll do well on your platform. He is way too happy about a developer doing poorly because it hurts his competition.

Taking a look at the overall sales numbers sometime in January will give a much better snapshot of how this game is doing. I wouldn't be surprised at all if December is where this game moves its Xbox One copies, especially with Microsoft recently giving away 2013's Tomb Raider on Games with Gold. I'd never played the 2013 game, and am just finishing it up now. I played it and enjoyed it a great deal, and now plan on buying Rise of the Tomb Raider with Christmas gift cards. I'm sure I'm not alone there. Moreover, Rise of the Tomb Raider isn't the kind of game people feel like they have to buy on release day a la Halo 5, Fallout, et al. Judging it on a regional snapshot pre-Black Friday and pre-Christmas seems awfully premature. I imagine the game will do fine long-term, on both Xbox One and beyond. As for Sony, they need to worry about their own exclusives instead of mocking a timed-exclusivity deal that may or may not work out for MS and may be the only reason this game even exists.

I will most likely get it when it comes out on PC. I liked the previous Tomb Raider and it looked great on PC.

Hopefully this signals the potential return of a more classic design of Lara Croft.

I bet its final sales will end up just fine, especially when it comes out on other platforms. This holiday it's just meant to be another arrow in Microsoft's quiver (get it?) as proof of their stronger holiday lineup, as illusionary as this arrow may be.

Isn't Tomb Raider just Uncharted-With-A-Woman at this point? Looks boring as hell. You know what's exciting about slowly climbing a cliff while the camera swooshes about a bit? Absolutely nothing whatsoever.

Fuck platform exclusivity.

That is all.

Apparently not. Apparnetly this is more of a game than uncharted is.

I was completely turned off by what I saw of the previous game and it's lack of being a game, but this one apparently has some open ended elements that make it sound like it might be a good time.

The continued success of that version of the character in their downloadable titles can't go unnoticed.

Tomb Raider Go, for instance, was great. (Not as good as Hitman Go, but whatchagonnado)

Like other people said, they made some pretty bad buisness desicions with this. I'd be more surprised if it was super successful.

Timed exclusives on the least selling platform not working out in their favor? Weird.

Moronic move. Bad move for CD to accept MS console exclusive offer. Releasing it the same day as the most over hyped game of 2015 wasn't quite bright either. It's a shame since I would've bought it over F4 personally. Looking forward to the PC release.

engh. That remains to be seen.

People are acting like MS just gave them a few hundred bucks to make the game. My understanding is that they are PUBLISHING the game for them. If MS publishes it and they retain all rights? That's a pretty sweet deal for them. They will just put the game out on PC and PS4 next year in an enhanced form and with a bunch of pull quotes about how great it is and how well it reviewed.

It might work out well for them, who knows. Especially since it would likely not exist except in this format. It's Microsoft who is the true loser here. This was supposed to sell consoles for them and if it doesn't THIS MONTH, it won't ever. THey had a lot riding on this.