What Rise of the Tomb Raider's sales could imply

[Arkaign]

RoTTR could very well have X1 finish with the highest sales if the PS4 release bombs.

Historically late ports seldom are very successful. Rare are the exceptions like Minecraft where the title sells regardless. If the holiday 2016 date holds for the PS4 version, it could again be swamped by mega-titles and fall by the wayside.

And finally, the most important element is who the IP holder is and what their views are. By all accounts, Square Enix has been poorly managed for a while (the CEO resigned in disgrace in 2013 and things haven't exactly looked stellar in the time since then).

If RoTTR appears to them as an utter failure, they could easily chalk it up to 'people don't want more TR' instead of 'we royally screwed this up and TR deserves a better chance'.

If RoTTR was mulitplatform and released on a non-suicidal date, there's every reason to believe it could have been a big hit out of the gate and perhaps even surpassed the 3.4M first month sales of TR2013. Speaking of that, TR2013 must have been managed pretty poorly on the budget side because they publicly complained about 'disappointing sales' until the later press release after hitting 6M units, by which time they said it had surpassed profit expectations.

If your budget is whacked to the point where 3.4M units sold in the first month is a failure in any way, either you're Activision selling COD, or you are insanely bad at business and need to do literally anything other than be in charge of a video game company.