As others said, the game itself likely brought a tidy profit and was a success in its own right. The publisher though was expecting more (which is nuts) and likely was wanting more sales simply to offset losses and expenses elsewhere.

I think Square just has many hanging expenses and had a lot of expectations for this title. 3.4 is a very good number for a title like this.

i really liked the game. Was a day one purchase for me and I never regretted it. The problem I see is the price. I am not a poor by any means so its easier for me to buy anything I want but I do have ALOT of friends that dont have the best jobs or I hear alot of people go "65.00 for a game is nuts" then they never buy it.

Its the prices that keep people away

3.4 MILLION TIMES 60 bucks...
Somehow somebody is getting a lot of money...

It depends on production values, man hours and the size of the team necessary to bring it to multiple consoles. If it represented the sales of JUST the 360 or the PS3 then they would be considered pretty good numbers. Having said that, I think that SE had unreal expectations anyway.

Bandit all around. These publisher would milk us dry if they could p. Most games that sell over a million are profitable, I'm sure over two million this became profitable for them, These greedy %ucks just always cry and want more money. The sales aren't even ended for this game it will easily hit 5 mil when its all said and done,

As the saying goes, It takes money to make money. Or... Word of mouth isn't enough to line my pockets.

Advertizing "Cost" money! This this is a well known fact.

Look at from the flip side, Who's getting paid to shower ads over the n4g site and it's subsidiaries?

I didn't buy it, I got it off of the AMD video card deal, with Bioshock at newegg.

I fear for the future of gaming. It used to be great to move a million units. Now apparently selling 3 million + is bad. Even if TR made money SquareEnix they still posted billions in loses. If they keep it up they may end up like THQ in a few years. I never thought I'd see the day but the company hasn't been a powerhouse since its snes, PS1/2 days.

So basically you guys are telling the people who made the game and spent money on it that 3.4 million across three systems is enough? What are you their accountants or something.How do you know it is enough? Was it your money they spent?

Because the devs dont see a lot of that money...its goes to the PUBLISHER, just for starters. Production values are going through the roof to bring these endless whiners a prettier game every year and yet in gamers ignorance they still bitch about the possibility of game prices going up when they have no clue what running a game company entails. I am surpised prices havent gone up already. These devs arent working with an atari 2600 where a game can be made for a few thousand bucks in a few weeks. Its as though these kids think running a game company is a "license to print money". Put down your pudding cup and research a real world game dev business scenario.
Here's a loose one and perhaps not entirely accurate but you get the basic idea: Mommy and Daddy want you-(dev) to cut the lawn and will pay you 5.00. You have to pay for the gas-(publisher) 3.50 to run the mower. That leaves you 1.50 to pay back your friend-(employees) for the lollypops and gumballs he gave you. Whats left over for you? Not much. Not to mention licensing fees to Sony and MS etc for putting the game on their system. And this is just the tip of the iceberg for expenses.

The problem is not that Tomb Raider or Hitman weren't successful games. The problem is Square had put high hopes on their sales to make up for deficiencies in the companies other products. Final Fantasy 14, Versus 13.. both are basically money pits in that company. They have sunk tons of dollars into them and were expecting other games sales to help off set the losses they have taken from those games and their development. Their expectations were way to high and they refuse to look at the real issue which is their Japanese team.

Across 3 platforms it averages 1.13 Million per platform; that's actually really good and still a lot of people. In my eyes anyway.

And don't forget: The game has only been out for just over 2 weeks. There's still a whole year to go, what with birthdays, price drops, and christmas to come.

I love Tomb Raider and if I had a job I'd totally buy it brand new instead of buying used like I do for 99% of my games. Yeah I buy used. Sue me.

Games made in a board room dont make profit easily. Game made by by devs make tons of money, look at the witcher 2, it probably has only sold 2 million by now, made enough profit to make an open world witcher 3 and another game.

Something is inherently wrong. Those are amazing sales numbers. Especially from a franchise that technically died a decade ago. I'm buying it eventually.

i believe it is because how much bigger the used game market has become then ever before and because of this growth company's dont have the ability to count on second hand new game sells and only of the first round sells. so think of it as this your company makes other games that might put you in the red b/c their not all selling as good a 3 million copies and and the little sells thoes games do make is great for the time but it wont last and your really able to count on only first hand new sells never second hand new sells. b/c older games sell like hot cakes for a used game market that give the company and the developers new money for it game their but putting them in the red so when big games do come they might give them 3.5 million copies but their company is in a bigger red hoe then of lets say 7.6 million so then a very well selling game has to do call of duty numbers inorder to make your company money then even with the big games you cant count on second hand new sells b/c again lots of ppl well buy a used copie of a hot going game and guess what you cant pay the bills with nothing.

OH MY GOD!!! DOES NO ONE KNOW HOW TO READ CHARTS ANYMORE???

http://images.eurogamer.net...

"Despite the high critical acclaim, failed to meet each target"

Tomb Raider DIDN'T reach 3.4 Million, that was the GOAL it didn't achieve.

A lot probably has to go to investors and paying back possible loans and whatnot. Also employee's salaries. Also distribution. Also advertisement. Also paying Sony and Microsoft etc. In fact there's probably much more payments involved than I or anyone realises. (except mattgrowcott above)

The profit is what's left, so clearly all of the above stuff and more is costing them a lot.

ill tell you this if the first 20 yrs of gaming had a used market like this the gaming industry would have died years ago in we all forget the used game industry started in the year 2000

I guess if you compare the sales figure and the profit to it's production cost, we will see that it didn't exceed it's sales expectation.

Let me guess the production cost would be $100,000.000?. I

whats interesting is hitman sold more that tomb raider and it wasnt profitable either. i guess square just wants every game to sell 5+ million.

This article is taking one line from a small report that Tomb raider didn't sell as much as they wanted it to and making sound like they didn't make money from it. They expected a certain number of sales and it didn't reach those no where did it say that it was not profitable. Yeah this is "game journalism"

Its not profitable because Square doesn't make good financial decisions year round and can't expect one game to make up for their fuck ups

she didnt get naked thats only reason it didnt sell as well

just because..

If 3.4 million isn't enough then the video game industry is going to crash real soon.

For shits and giggles the only console this game did not hit was the Wii-U they should have thrown the game on that console it would have helped the numbers out a bit. Hell bring a Vita port of the game out as well. I wouldn't mind a Wii-U version. PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 are just three of the four gaming machines. Problem is SquareEnix is trying to get the magic numbers that a COD games get.

Square actually published some of the best games this gen- Just Cause 2, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Tomb Raider and Sleeping Dogs just off the top of my head. I don't like to see them in trouble like this, hope they turn it around.

Square-Enix always expect 20+ trillion sales.

The AAA market is a harsh mistress, that's why.

Because in business it's always never enough.

What does this mean for the future of lara, if square enix is not satisfied with the sales of a nigh perfect tomb raider? Will they make her boobs bigger for the next entry? Sex sells after all. More action?
Eidos have proven that they wouln't give in to pressures from feministos, can they survive the same fate if pressured from a greedy publisher?
I want this game and its sequels to succeed so badly but I don't want to pay full price, because of game of the year editions and from having 30+ games on my hdd alone(playstation plus freebies and discounts) and my willingness to wait for a price drop.
Sigh...

After reading into it, I don't think Square is saying its not profitable. They are simply saying "it didn't reach our goal." Which in the most simplistic terms means "Our investors are not happy."

According to analysts etc, Tomb Raider would have to push close to 8-10 million units for them to be happy.... Square simply over exaggerated their sales targets for their 3 main releases. Now their investors are going "wtf, you told us we would have more!"

God I hope that's not true. But I could see it considering the production values of this game. It's like the Uncharted games but longer and better looking. Playing it right now about 12 hours in and I'm just blown away how good this game is. And if anything the Tomb Raider name is actually hurting sales because people expect crap at this point. This developer has insane talent and I'll be very disappointed if they don't get funded for another big game.

Perfect blueprint for failure

I already mentioned why so many games suck and the model of Netflix's entertainment mill is high on that list.

fuck off

A perfect blueprint to produce more trash that nobody likes? Yeah, they sure do!