Square enix says tombraider did not hit sales target

richymcdermott

so 3.4 million is bad now ? i dunno what to say to this.

if they were expecting tomb raider to make , what was it ? 14-15 million in sales, you are sure to be disappointed.

keep your expectations low , especially for 1 game they Resurrected from the grave with sleeping dogs and two reboots.

Overheal

I think the real disappointment here is that 20 million people bought Call of Duty..

Pushtrak

richymcdermott wrote: »

if they were expecting tomb raider to make , what was it ? 14-15 million in sales, you are sure to be disappointed.

That was across 3 games, not one, if I'm not mistaken.

chrislad

It would be a shame if these were killed - Tomb Raider and Hitman are both established franchises so I don't expect them to be canned truthfully - I've actually just started Sleeping Dogs. It's definitely a unique take on the sandbox genre so far, and it's always nice to be able to drive on the proper side of the road

Grumpypants

Games cost a huge amount these days, a pretty average game to get from concept to stores costs around the $120 million mark. That's developing it and marketing and shipping to stores. The Reckoning for example racked up debts of about 120 mill. It had around 150-200 people working on it. Those 200 people have to sit in a studio for 2-3 years so there are huge costs for wages, rent, health care etc. Then they each need a super hot PC with expensive licensed software. Then you have to market it, so you need PR teams, TV adverts, magazines, trade shows etc.

If it is a new IP/New engine/ new studio those costs can easily get out of control when simple errors are not caught and rectified early.

COD costs around $300 million afaik and is split 150 to develop and 150 for marketing but they really market it to sell to the COD fan base who prob wouldn't read in-depth articles on PC gaming sites and need adverts in the super bowl and champions league final.

So for something like Tomb Raider you are talking new engine, new dev team building a game that looks that good and shipping/marketing it could be anywhere between $100-150 million being conservative. Throw similar money at Hitman and Sleeping Dogs it would be safe to assume SE invested a good $400 millish

Digital sales are not counted yet but they still have a cost attached, SE have to pay Steam or Origin a cut, plus there is not a big a difference in cost between digital and physical as many think.

It costs around 50 cent per game to burn in a factory. People have the misconception that digital is practically free but they forget the huge costs in delivering the data and paying for bandwidth (especially in the states) and having the structure in place to do that and support it. There is a much higher mark up for the company but at the same time you have discount code sites selling games at discounts before they are even released.

Look at Bioshock Infinite a game that should walk out the door at €50 and easily sell 5mill copies was available for pre order with 2 extra free games for €28. That eats into the publishers margin which knocks on down the line.

Then you factor in the rise in PC gaming and the rise again of huge rates of piracy. It is not a coincidence that less people are buying on console and more playing on PC/cracked consoles and the sales figures are simply not matching up.

It is no wonder every publisher wants a COD or Battlefield to depend on.

gizmo

I was going to mention this in the Thief thread when people complained about their stated desire to reach a wider audience but it seems to be relevant here too, consider the following...

The original Thief was released way back in 1998 by Looking Glass. By about 2000 it had sold around two million copies and was deemed commercially successful by Eidos. Over the course of its roughly two and a half year development cycle and $3m budget, about fifty people worked on the game in total.

Now look at modern games, look at their team sizes, length of development cycles, engine/tool creation or licencing costs, the quality of the assets featured in these games, the marketing needed to reach anything approaching a decent audience across multiple territories etc... Now look at how much they're charging for them. Now, do you really think that it's unreasonable for a publisher to not jump for joy when their latest game using a hugely popular IP with new engine only sells 3.4m copies?

Hell, with many AAA-games failing to break two million and even more only limping past the one million figure after months on sale, it's not like they'd be alone in such disappointment. That being said, as I mentioned in the Dead Space thread, publishers really do need to revisit the mid-tier level of games again but in this case Tomb Raider is most certainly not a mid-tier game. I expect Squeenix expected 5m+ sales in the first month or so so it's not particularly surprising that they're unhappy with the current estimates.

The multiplayer is an odd one too, as someone said below and as someone questioned on the TR thread itself, the inclusion of multiplayer is simple - get people to buy the game early at closer to RRP, hold onto their copies after completion, not trade them in, spread the word to their friends, increase sales and brand loyalty and, based on that, sell more multiplayer content which will have, generally speaking, much higher profit margins that single player content. Now, as with seemingly everyone else, I still don't like its inclusion in TR, nor for that matter did I want to see it in ME3. While the latter has proven to be extremely successful at least it's nice to see TRs not do so well. Hopefully this will encourage some SP DLC to be developed and, in terms of a sequel, Squeenix to realise a cheaper game can possibly be made by dropping this mode going forward.

cherryghost

Just to compare, Tomb Raider 2 sold over 5 million copies, Tomb Raider 1 just over 4.5 mill, Tomb Raider III sold 3.5m and The Last Revolution sold and underwhelming 2.5m. The series was in decline since TR3. 3.6m sold in less than a month is respectable in retrospect.

COYVB

Grumpypants wrote: »

Games cost a huge amount these days, a pretty average game to get from concept to stores costs around the $120 million mark. That's developing it and marketing and shipping to stores. The Reckoning for example racked up debts of about 120 mill. It had around 150-200 people working on it. Those 200 people have to sit in a studio for 2-3 years so there are huge costs for wages, rent, health care etc. Then they each need a super hot PC with expensive licensed software. Then you have to market it, so you need PR teams, TV adverts, magazines, trade shows etc.

If it is a new IP/New engine/ new studio those costs can easily get out of control when simple errors are not caught and rectified early.

COD costs around $300 million afaik and is split 150 to develop and 150 for marketing but they really market it to sell to the COD fan base who prob wouldn't read in-depth articles on PC gaming sites and need adverts in the super bowl and champions league final.

So for something like Tomb Raider you are talking new engine, new dev team building a game that looks that good and shipping/marketing it could be anywhere between $100-150 million being conservative. Throw similar money at Hitman and Sleeping Dogs it would be safe to assume SE invested a good $400 millish

Where on earth are you getting those ludicrous figures from? A triple A game costs in the region of $50-65m usually (though I can think of quite a few notable exceptions). An average game, quarter to half that

ShadowHearth

COYVB wrote: »

Where on earth are you getting those ludicrous figures from? A triple A game costs in the region of $50-65m usually (though I can think of quite a few notable exceptions). An average game, quarter to half that

I have to agree. Even fat googling shows that average game budget is about 30mil dollars.

I might see some games toping 50-60mil, but 120mil as average to make AAA game these days is a bit out of proportions. Unless every second staff is on sick leave and Claus millions from company like a big part of high payed medical staff in Ireland.

hooradiation

gizmo wrote: »

Now look at modern games, look at their team sizes, length of development cycles, engine/tool creation or licencing costs, the quality of the assets featured in these games, the marketing needed to reach anything approaching a decent audience across multiple territories etc... Now look at how much they're charging for them. Now, do you really think that it's unreasonable for a publisher to not jump for joy when their latest game using a hugely popular IP with new engine only sells 3.4m copies?

Gamers don't understand how games are made, in much the same way people who go to the cinema don't understand how a film gets made. Not that it stops either group from going on at length about how they feel they ought to be made.

Which kind of explains the clusterfuck we have now where the price of a game has more or less remained static (accounting for inflation) for decades while the cost of making one has risen in order to keep up with the demand for higher fidelity that gamers themselves are driving.

the formula being put forward seems to be that "games must look good, be cheap with no DLC, collectors editions or microtransactions and not expect to sell very much, because to do so would be greedy".

I'd like to see the voodoobullshitmaths that they'll use to make that equation work.....

Gunmonkey

hooradiation wrote: »

Which kind of explains the clusterfuck we have now where the price of a game has more or less remained static (accounting for inflation) for decades while the cost of making one has risen in order to keep up with the demand for higher fidelity that gamers themselves are driving.

the formula being put forward seems to be that "games must look good, be cheap with no DLC, collectors editions or microtransactions and not expect to sell very much, because to do so would be greedy".

I'd like to see the voodoobullshitmaths that they'll use to make that equation work.....

Except it has to have extra content after release...for free...and not be anything similar to the base game because that would have been cut from it, obviously.....but also cant be different from the main game as its not what they payed for. It also has to look photo realistic, run on something as powerful as a tamagotchi, have the best netcode ever (and still be in the wrong if its the users connection being ****), not have a single bug, come with a manual bigger than the collected Wheel of Time books, etc etc etc.

Venom

hooradiation wrote: »

Gamers don't understand how games are made, in much the same way people who go to the cinema don't understand how a film gets made. Not that it stops either group from going on at length about how they feel they ought to be made.

Which kind of explains the clusterfuck we have now where the price of a game has more or less remained static (accounting for inflation) for decades while the cost of making one has risen in order to keep up with the demand for higher fidelity that gamers themselves are driving.

the formula being put forward seems to be that "games must look good, be cheap with no DLC, collectors editions or microtransactions and not expect to sell very much, because to do so would be greedy".

I'd like to see the voodoobullshitmaths that they'll use to make that equation work.....

You fail to take into account how much bigger, more mainstream and much more profitable the games market is these days compared to how it was "decades ago" when it was a very niche market.

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

well yeah for the likes of cod, fifa, gears, etc

it's everyone else that has to worry.

sarumite

sheehy83 wrote: »

Crazy, it's only a few weeks old and is a brilliant game. It was a 'success' in the gaming world as it is generally considered a very good game.

Mad how little Sleeping Dogs sold and that was the 3rd best game of last year imo.

I started playing sleeping dogs now as I have it on PS+. It is a game that never even entered my radar and I am surprised by how good it was. I

gizmo

Venom wrote: »

You fail to take into account how much bigger, more mainstream and much more profitable the games market is these days compared to how it was "decades ago" when it was a very niche market.

Except it's not?

The market may be bigger in terms of the console install base and number of gaming-ready PCs but as I've repeatedly pointed out, the sales of the non-massive AAA games haven't increased in line with these changes.

As for it being more profitable, how can that be true if sales aren't increasing, prices are stagnant and development costs are skyrocketing?

The last couple of posts provide a perfect example of this. Thief, with it's $3m buget and 2m sales was deemed commercially successful back in 1998 yet the average modern game with its $30-50m budget is selling around the same figure these days.

hooradiation

Venom wrote: »

You fail to take into account how much bigger, more mainstream and much more profitable the games market is these days compared to how it was "decades ago" when it was a very niche market.

Unless games sales have been universally trending upwards with increase in development costs then this isn't really relevant is it?

lets compare some numbers, shall we?

The original tomb Raider was made by a team of six people, over 18 months and sold 7 million copies
The current tomb raider was made by crystal dynamics, a company of about 170 odd people now, given they laid off 30 people in '09 to focus "solely on tomb raider" lets say about 150 people, and this was over the course of five years and has sold 3.4 million copies.

Now, what part of the market being larger do you think has a bearing on those numbers
And what makes you think I failed to take that inconsequential factor into account?

Kirby

hooradiation wrote: »

Unless games sales have been universally trending upwards with increase in development costs then this isn't really relevant is it?

lets compare some numbers, shall we?

The original tomb Raider was made by a team of six people, over 18 months and sold 7 million copies
The current tomb raider was made by crystal dynamics, a company of about 170 odd people now, given they laid off 30 people in '09 to focus "solely on tomb raider" lets say about 150 people, and this was over the course of five years and has sold 3.4 million copies.

Now, what part of the market being larger do you think has a bearing on those numbers
And what makes you think I failed to take that inconsequential factor into account?

3.4 million is a soft number.....it doesn't include digital sales which I would imagine would be quite large. You are also failing to take into account digital sales profit which is close to 100%. There is no manufacturing costs, no paper costs, no delivery costs, no defective returns costs etc.

You are focusing on "sales" when you should be focusing on "profits". There is quite a large difference.

Retr0gamer

Interesting points. Research might be coming out saying that gaming is bigger and more ubiquitous than ever but that's counting people that play the odd free to play mobile game and aren't rushing out on release day to pick up Tomb Raider.

Looking at the ever unreliable VGchartz has the combined 360 and PS3 sales at 140 million. Take into consideration how many people rebought a console due to reliability isues and it's not far off the 120 million of the PS2. I don't really see how these game budgets can be sustainable, most of the work on these games is already outsourced to the likes of China and India.

I still think a lot of it is down to bad management. They should be a little more realistic with expected sales and budget accordingly.

hooradiation wrote:

I'd like to see the voodoobull****maths that they'll use to make that equation work.....

You can be gauranteed there's bean counters in every major publisher applying some equation they got out of the latest financial journal and coming up with bull****.

Azza

I imagine profit on digital games is higher than retail, but I doubt its close to 100%, the content provider will be taking a cut and there is going to be a cost to all the bandwidth used and server storage.

gizmo

Kirby wrote: »

3.4 million is a soft number.....it doesn't include digital sales which I would imagine would be quite large. You are also failing to take into account digital sales profit which is close to 100%. There is no manufacturing costs, no paper costs, no delivery costs, no defective returns costs etc.

You are focusing on "sales" when you should be focusing on "profits". There is quite a large difference.

Those physical costs make up (approximately) less than 8% of the actual retail price of a video game though, a figure which translates into a fairly small portion of the overall development cost.

What the usual argument against higher pricing on the digital market also fails to recognise is that services such as Steam et al also take a remarkably large cut of the sale. While we'll never know exactly how much due to various agreements publishers and developers alike would need to sign, I generally assumed it was along the lines of the 30% Apple and such had adopted however in a recent interview on the success of Garry's Mod, Newman was quoted as saying that his company sees less than half of the money from the sales and that's before the taxman even gets his hands on it. So, unless he also has some sort of other deal with Valve due to how his mod leverages the game, their cut could be even higher than I and others assumed.

Logical_Bear

krudler wrote: »

Even if it was a disappointment sales wise, it got good reviews and was well recieved by anyone who played it, thus breathing fresh life into the TR franchise again, expectations go up, people become interesting in a sequel, sequel makes more money, wheels keep turning.

Thats especially true for a younger generation of gamers

Reekwind

hooradiation wrote: »

Gamers don't understand how games are made, in much the same way people who go to the cinema don't understand how a film gets made. Not that it stops either group from going on at length about how they feel they ought to be made.

Which kind of explains the clusterfuck we have now where the price of a game has more or less remained static (accounting for inflation) for decades while the cost of making one has risen in order to keep up with the demand for higher fidelity that gamers themselves are driving

I'd suggest that the evidence is that the games industry increasing doesn't understand how games are made. Certainly Yoichi Wada's grasp seems to have been fuzzy of late

But I do take issue with the idea that it is an obsession with graphics on the part of consumers that has driven costs. The most obvious problem with such an assertion is that recent years (ie the period in which these companies have been struggling) are those in which the graphics arms race has been at its slowest. A decade ago an engine might become obsolete while a game was in development but that is almost unheard of today

Whether due to the approaching end-life of the consoles or the realisation that customers don't particularly care any more, it's certainly not graphical fidelity that is driving higher costs

And frankly, even if studios are squandering millions on production values then it's nobody's fault but their own

the formula being put forward seems to be that "games must look good, be cheap with no DLC, collectors editions or microtransactions and not expect to sell very much, because to do so would be greedy"

Since when have AAA titles been cheap?

gizmo

Reekwind wrote: »

I'd suggest that the evidence is that the games industry increasing doesn't understand how games are made. Certainly Yoichi Wada's grasp seems to have been fuzzy of late

But I do take issue with the idea that it is an obsession with graphics on the part of consumers that has driven costs. The most obvious problem with such an assertion is that recent years (ie the period in which these companies have been struggling) are those in which the graphics arms race has been at its slowest. A decade ago an engine might become obsolete while a game was in development but that is almost unheard of today

Whether due to the approaching end-life of the consoles or the realisation that customers don't particularly care any more, it's certainly not graphical fidelity that is driving higher costs

While the graphical arms race has most certainly been fairly stagnant this generation, at least on a technical level compared to the previous years, the current level has still resulted in a bar being set for asset creation which necessitates an extremely large investment on the content side of things. This is where the demands of gamers is relevant, since the reusing of assets across levels, lack of general variety in such levels/assets and the length of games in general are all areas frequently called out but all require an increased budget in order to adequately address.

Reekwind wrote: »

Since when have AAA titles been cheap?

Well I guess the logic goes that if a AAA game in the 90s cost the equivalent of €50 and a AAA game nowadays costs about the same, then it is relatively cheaper.

hooradiation

Kirby wrote: »

3.4 million is a soft number.....it doesn't include digital sales which I would imagine would be quite large. You are also failing to take into account digital sales profit which is close to 100%. There is no manufacturing costs, no paper costs, no delivery costs, no defective returns costs etc.

Nope.
Do you imagine Valve et al sell those games without taking a cut? It's in and around the 40% mark.

Lets be silly and say that then new tomb raider has sold as much as the original - now, which one made the most profit?

Kirby wrote: »

You are focusing on "sales" when you should be focusing on "profits". There is quite a large difference.

Not really, but everyone else who thinks 3.4 million was "plenty" should have a nice read of this.

Reekwind wrote: »

But I do take issue with the idea that it is an obsession with graphics on the part of consumers that has driven costs. The most obvious problem with such an assertion is that recent years (ie the period in which these companies have been struggling) are those in which the graphics arms race has been at its slowest. A decade ago an engine might become obsolete while a game was in development but that is almost unheard of today

You can take issue all you like, but you're wrong.

Your observation about switching engines being unheard of doesn't matter. It now takes more people, thus more man hours, thus higher costs to produce a game today then it did ten years ago.
Team sizes have gone from 16 to 160.
This is not something you can take issue with and have a point.

The idea that switching tech leads to more costly games is true, but the idea that not switching tech leads to lower costs is only true compared to the costs of a game that would have made such a switch.

Reekwind wrote: »

Whether due to the approaching end-life of the consoles or the realisation that customers don't particularly care any more, it's certainly not graphical fidelity that is driving higher costs

And frankly, even if studios are squandering millions on production values then it's nobody's fault but their own

Deny it all you like, but the pursuit of graphic fidelity is all at the behest of the market. People expect a level of shine and if titles don't have it, they'll do badly.
Don't believe me? have a look at, say, the A:CM thread. Mountains of whine about how the graphics are "awful" even though they are objectively not. They are, however, below the acceptable threshold that consumers have created for the industry.

Or just wait until the subject of a "PC gaming" comes up again, time and time again you'll see people citing the increase in graphical fidelity over consoles as a major reason as to why people should use PC's for gaming.

Denying this is silly, blaming studios for doing what the market is dictating is stupid.

Reekwind wrote: »

Since when have AAA titles been cheap?

Exactly my point.
Escalating costs of development coupled with the idea that games ought to be even cheaper was the exact kind of bullshit equation i was talking about.

COYVB

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Take into consideration how many people rebought a console due to reliability isues and it's not far off the 120 million of the PS2.

Oh it's a lot lower than that I'd say. Based on some crude research, I'm willing to go out on a limb and say the 30% of next gen console owners have bought the same console more than once

nesf

hooradiation wrote: »

Nope.
Do you imagine Valve et al sell those games without taking a cut? It's in and around the 40% mark.

Says? Valve are notoriously closemouthed about sales and their cut. Most speculation I've seen have it between 20-30%

COYVB

nesf wrote: »

Says? Valve are notoriously closemouthed about sales and their cut. Most speculation I've seen have it between 20-30%

I'd be very surprised if it was less than 35% given the fact that it's the de facto place to buy PC games

gizmo

nesf wrote: »

Says? Valve are notoriously closemouthed about sales and their cut. Most speculation I've seen have it between 20-30%

In case you thought I was pulling the above figure out of thin air...

Over 7 years GMod has made about 22 million dollars. We get less than half of that though. Then the tax man gets a bunch of that. Then when we take money out of the company the tax man gets a bunch of that too.

Since Garry's Mod is only sold on Steam, I'm extremely interested to know what happened to that half.

Link

ScumLord

Poor corporation, they expected to make loads and loads of money but they only made loads of money. Poor things.

Grumpypants wrote: »

Games cost a huge amount these days, a pretty average game to get from concept to stores costs around the $120 million mark.

I'd wonder how much they spend on frivolous marketing and renting opulent conference rooms so they can have a chin wag?

Many established businesses think they can throw money at problems and they'll go away. It sounds like they're hiring 5 people to do the job of one.

Kickstarter has shown people making fairly big complex games on a fraction of the money simply because they're not in that corporate structure.

gizmo

ScumLord wrote: »

Poor corporation, they expected to make loads and loads of money but they only made loads of money. Poor things.

The company expected to make 3.5 billion yen (£24.4m) profit, but will now make a 13 billion yen (£90m) loss.

ScumLord wrote: »

Kickstarter has shown people making fairly big complex games on a fraction of the money simply because they're not in that corporate structure.

To date there hasn't been one AAA standard game released via Kickstarter. Yes, there have been some awesome indie games and lower tier games but nothing that would come close to the scale of the Tomb Raider project.

EDIT: To elaborate on that, I stress the released part. There are a couple in development that are going to be really interesting to keep an eye on, primarily Star Citizen given it's rather massive scope and large crowd funding figure. I'm also delighted to see such projects, particularly in the genres I love, get funding when they would have otherwise been ignored by publishers. I am, however, skeptical that we can see larger projects get funding through such means. Perhaps it'll take some big sucess stories to happen, who knows. Again, to link back to what was discussed before, what it may even do is show publishers that financial success can be found in these small-mid tier niche games since they are also free of some of the ridiculous overheads associated with working on larger projects with bigger publishers.