Rise of Tomb Raider XBox1 = sales dud of the year?

[binary solo]

LipeJJ said:

loy310 said:

Wow sales are so bad, they might not wait a year.

Well, that depends on the contract, if they signed for 1 year they'll have to wait. Maybe the wait is for the best since the game will probably arrive on PS4 with all DLCs included, patches, bug fixes and whatnot.

If SE was smart they would have put some performance criteria into their contract. During the period of full exclusivity (i.e. prior to PC release) the benchmark for sales must be X. If X is not achieved, to within say 95%,  then the PS4 release can be opened up to any time SE can make it ready to release, rather than wait a full year.

The question is whether SE was smart. KNowing they are releasing on the weaker selling console with the smaller fanbase for the franchise is a substantial risk for SE, and they should have tried to cover that risk by getting some ball-breaker clauses for non-performance. I bet MS had some ball-breaker clauses, liek a minimum metacritic score. After all if you pay big $$ for a 3rd party exclusive you don't want a dud game. CD/SE delivered on the game quality MS needs to deliver on the sales. Of course if SE tried to invoke any ball-breaker clauses it would be lawyers at 10 paces, and MS would be claiming that SE's release date decision was mostly to blame. Then SE could counter that no date was a good date for RoTR, because late October was Halo 5, and then November was big game after big game. To be free and clear of other big game releases RoTR would have had to launch on BF week or in the first week of December. The game was probably not ready early Oct, but really early Oct was the best time for the game to release.

People might have apoint that morally SFV and ROTR are no different, though there are subtleties to the deals that make it arguable, and not many people say all moneyhatting is bad, so there is a spectrum of purely evil mopneyhatting through to completely beneficial moneyhatting. These two deals fall somewhere in the middle. But the big difference is that in the case of SFV the vast majority of interests in this game are like to benefit substantially. Sony benefits by having an exclusive fighter to somewhat counterbalance KI, Capcom benefits by receiving money and help with development, and being able to release the game earlier than they could have without the cash injection. The vast majority of the SFV fanbase benefits because PS4+PC  fanbases>>>Xbox fanbase. And even a lot of the Xbox fanbase will have PCs capable of playing the game and hence they won't actually miss out. eSports benefits by having reasonable support going into the eSports / pro-gaming scene. Gamer-wise there are no losers with RoTR because it is coming to PS4, so that makes the RoTR deal better for all gamers. But as things have turne dout there are signficant risks to the longevity of the franchise which may materialise. And if the game underperforms as a result of this deal to the point where SE and CD walk away from the IP completely then the long term result is that all gamers lose. So if people are true fans of TR and not just bickering console warriors, they should be critical of this deal for potentially putting the IP at risk, and they should be hoping for good sales on PC and more importantly PS4.