MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
Square Enix has revealed the extent of how far it missed its sales forecasts for Tomb Raider, Hitman: Absolution and Sleeping Dogs by.
In revision to its financial forecasts, outgoing president Yoichi Wada said it had expected to sell five-to-six million copies of Tomb Raider, and as many as 2.5 million copies of Sleeping Dogs and five million units of Hitman: Absolution.
He added that the publisher tried to hedge its risk when budgeting the number sales into the forecast, and based it on 80-to-90 per cent of total sales potential per title, which it still failed to reach.
Last month it was revealed that to date, Tomb Raider had reported 3.4 million sales, while Hitman: Absolution reached 3.6 million and Sleeping Dogs hit 1.75 million.
Wada said that Square Enix’s selling capacity “has been worse than we ever imagined”. The publisher was also hit by additional costs in dealing with distribution channels, as well as large restructuring expenses as it closed a new casual games division at its US subsidiary and halted production at other studios.
Although it missed expectations in the console space, Square Enix noted that its Social gaming business had shown a solid performance, with continuous growth in net sales. It said that profits had also continued improve steadily.
Despite a solid performance in the social gaming space, Wada said that a failure to meet expectations and the huge losses taken by the publisher was “like a voice from the heavens telling me it’s time to move on”.
He stated that when he steps down in June, he will no longer be a staff member of Square Enix Holdings, and will have no say in future management, but wanted to continue to work for the firm in some capacity and “give back to a company that granted me so much”.
Yousuke Matsuda is to fill Wada’s vacated role until a permanent successor can be found.
