Square Enix have revealed that they expected sales of Crystal Dynamics' Tomb Raider reboot to be nearly double what they were for the first month.
Tomb Raider, which broke series' sales records, nonetheless fell far short of Square Enix's expectations. The game was purchased 3.4 million times in its first month while Square Enix had anitcipated sales of 5-6 million.
They even considered this to be a conservative figure estimating that this would be just 80-90% of total sales for the game, even without that extra 10-20% Tomb Raider clearly fell far short of their expectations.
Sales of Sleeping Dogs and Hitman Absolution were also far below what Square Enix had anticipated. To date Sleeping Dogs has sold 1.75 millions copies compared to the 2-2.5 million planned. Hitman Absolution meanwhile has also come in below target with 3.6 million units sold, Square Enix had projected 4.5-5 million.
Both of these estimates are calcuted on Square Enix's lower 80-90% of potential sales calculations. It is not clear what criteria was used in estimating sales figures for these games though they seem woefully optimistic.
In a new financial statement 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. However, we were very disappointed to see that the high scores did not translate to actual sales performance, which is where we see the susbtantial variance in operation profit/loss against the forecast."
Last month Square Enix's president Yoichi Wada announced he would be resigning pending the approval of shareholders at a meeting in June as the company is expecting an "extraordinary loss."
Yosuke Matsuda, who will be taking Wada's place, has promised to "fundamentally review what works and what doesn't for our company."
