By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
Arkaign on 04 December 2015
Edit Thread
bunchanumbers said:
Arkaign said:
bunchanumbers said:
Isn't this standard for Tomb Raider? I sincerely doubt that this game would have had massive sales even if it was PS4 exclusive. People like to act like the first one had blockbuster sales and in a sense it did. But the vast majority of those sales were at basement prices. I would not be shocked in the least if CD and SE were planning on this and took the MS money to make sure that it didn't need nearly as many basement sales to break even.

Seriously?


yup. These giant sales numbers you're talking about also went on systems that were around for many years and were pushing 150 million units. Not only that, the first month sales numbers while good, are still only a portion of the total sales in the end.

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

There is just no way that Rise Tomb Raider ends up selling units like the first one. There simply isn't enough units out there and it took years of basement sales before it got to profitability.

Okay, several things.

TR2013 sold 8.5M, 3.4M were in the first month (full price). We don't exactly know when the discounting started, but on console that typically takes a little while longer than PC for sure. Then there was the 'Definitive' console versions releasing again at full price later on. 

From this article we know that sometime between 3.4M units and 6M units it 'exceeded profit expectations' :

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/once-an-underperformer-tomb-raider-nearing-6-million-in-sales/1100-6418162/

Purely from a mathematical standpoint, 6M - 3.4M = 2.6M does not = 'the vast majority of sales being bargain sales' in order to limp to profitability.

Since you failed to address any of the other points and ignored them, I'll restate the main issue however. By ALL accounts, TR2013 was the most successful TR launch of all time, bar none. 3.4M sold in the first month. Going by industry norms, that's about a hundred million dollars coming back in profit (going with the $27 figure).

Now what does it mean if a title both blows away all previous sales records for the franchise and STILL is publicly called a disappointment by Square Enix? Just how crazy WAS the budget for TR2013, and how did they manage to screw up their projections so badly? That's just bad business practices by SE.

Finally, install base is actually not what you think it is in terms of sales reality. In the early period of the generation sales can actually be quite high for successful titles due to there being far less to choose from overall, concentrating things a good bit. Simultaneously you have the most hardcore and least price-concious people buying during the first phases of the console generation. So you see things like Forza 5 massively outselling Forza 6. And on very stable annual mega franchises like CoD and Madden, you see relative normalcy in numbers that seem to ignore install base.

Perhaps the biggest example of how install base doesn't geometrically inflate sales is Halo 3 to Halo 4 / Reach / ODST. The install base for X360 was absolutely puny on Halo 3's launch (smaller than X1 totals on Halo 5 launch!), but there was a REALLY hefty core fanbase that came out to buy it. Years later as the followup Halo games came out, the install base was absolutely massively higher, but again, the sales were in a similar range as before seemingly independent of install base.

All of this comes back to you comparing UNBELIEVABLY paltry TR2015 sales and saying 'Isn't this standard for Tomb Raider'? No, no it's not.

3.4M first month was above normal for TR franchise.

600kish first month is way below normal for TR franchise, even taking into account install base/only two platforms.