Agreed. For whatever reason they couldn't get anything better out of them so selling was the better option. I still think they sold them too cheaply though.
Tomb Raider series has sold 88m AAA units to date (38m reboot era) & 53m+ mobile units
- Thread starter AHA-Lambda
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Agreed. For whatever reason they couldn't get anything better out of them so selling was the better option. I still think they sold them too cheaply though.
What do the 53m paid mobile downloads entail? I know Lara Croft GO but it doesn't seem nearly that popular and the runner game is f2p. Is there anything else?
I can see why games developed in Japan would be more "competitive" in terms of budgets if Glassdoor is any indication (and if it's accurate). Someone in the same role will probably earn half as much (or less) in Tokyo compared to someone at Crystal Dynamics, depending on the role. Don't know if that's the case with Eidos as well.
It's opportunity cost. I don't know why it needs reexplaining now that we've seen the financial statements and margins from both studios, along with SE as a whole. SE sells the studios for $300M, eliminates their operating costs, and gets it elsewhere that has - according to their analysis - a higher ROI.
Honestly, even disregarding the debate of whether Square should or should not have thrown in the towel, it's absolutely baffling that they just sold the IP for peanuts relatively speaking.
IP is meaningless without a quantifiable market to sell into with high ROI.
This is a very good question.
There's Tomb Raider and the Guardian of the Light - that was on Android and iOS (and Blackberry Playbook), but it released later on those platforms so probably didn't clock up too many sales. It sold poorly enough that the next game in that short sub-series (Temple of Osiris) didn't appear on mobile.
Lara Croft GO is somewhere in the 1M to 5M range on Android - probably it sold better on iOS but even a total of 20M seems like a stretch. It also hasn't appeared on Apple Arcade or Google Play Pass, so there's no subscriber downloads that might boost the total.
So unless Lara Croft GO really did do huge numbers on iOS (like, many tens of millions kind of huge) then the bulk of the number could easily come from the ancient pre-smartphone Java Tomb Raider games. Some of them potentially sold pretty well. At least a few of them would probably have been pre-installed by mobile OEMs so maybe those are counted as paid "downloads".
I think at least some of the original trilogy was on Android and iOS, at least per Gamefaqs.
Oh, yes, forgot about them. They had comically inadequate touchscreen controls and I think I remember Eurogamer publishing a video showing themselves trying, and failing, to complete the first level of Tomb Raider II due to how awful the controls were.
There's probably a few million additional sales out of them.
Each one cost a hundred million or more to make, not all of then were sold at full price, and I think it definitely was diminishing returns, with 2013 having a disproportionate share of the sales (not that the other two were slouches).
Yeah, I got every Tomb Raider game at Steam for next to nothing
Oh, I completely forgot about those java games and I actually played them. Hard to imagine them doing big numbers, especially back then. But it's hard to actually estimate and there's no data to deny it, so they very well might have counted for a lot.
Also I remembered there was also a port of TR1 for N-Gage. Though I don't think that one lit the world on fire either lol.
We're likely going to find out, as there is a low chance that Embracer Group is going to pony up a AAA budget.
this is probably a good thing. they can go back to the series roots with platforming and puzzles. create that sense of isolation again. I know rise and shadow tried to do a bit of that here and there, but I want some actual challenging platforming and exploration. imagine what you could do with old school OG tomb raider level design combined with modern tech.
That's assuming they even get to make any games before Embracer Group sells them off to someone else again, or is bought up oof