Square Enix puts Deus Ex on hold (possibly Tomb Raider)

[Forlorn Drifter]

IDK about Deus Ex, but if I had to guess, they'll finish out this third Tomb Raider (with a new writer, mind you) and then move on to the Marvel bits. I may be wrong on that, but I feel like TR has enough pull to at least push this last one out before wading into new waters.

[Xeogred]

Seems like it from what others are saying here too and yeah, I think Tomb Raider probably has a bigger impact than Deus Ex in the long run, bit of a longer legacy.

Still need to hit up Rise of the Tomb Raider myself, but I loved the reboot and it looks just as good.

[Tanooki]

Square Enix sucks and they're probably going to be one of the first AAA towers that starts to crumble from the top. This industry can't continue to sustain their unrealistic expectations and budgets. Maybe they'll let Deus Ex idle for so long or the Eidos Montreal ownership can be cut, that someone else can revive it in better form down the road.

Squishy fan feelings and all that aside, this part here is something that is fairly true especially from the classic standpoint of the home gaming console. Various companies have these completely asinine expectations and then they don't meet them. Instead of showing some class and just being mum on it or rolling it into some quarterly stockholder jargon, you get people like SquareEnix as a stand out. They'll have the nerve to pop up, and moan how a game like that first Tomb Raider from a few years back sold like 4M+ copies and that wasn't enough and it lost money and hurt them. Companies perhaps need to have some more realistic expectations, not everything is a mindless licensed sports title people drone for nor are they all going to milk that Call of Duty dinero either from the FPS clans.

Maybe a new model is needed, or maybe it will be not just needed but forced. They're I think slowly realizing it making more and more android and IOS games, not just the classic library conversions/ports either. Look at that FF Mobius and the other, both full 3D titles that are free to play with some caveats, or their cheap-ishly priced Chaos Rings titles. High production quality there people don't whine about, they rake in good cash on those, and as their numbers show more of their money does in fact come from the microconsole/tablet space.

Perhaps to compete going forward game publishers who make full blown console and PC type titles need to move towards a more GoG/Steam and Android/iOS style of full blown game pricing, or a full blown title with added non-important fluff IAP (or add-on campaigns outside the primary story like FPS's and their map packs.) That could work far better than looking rotten and ungrateful bitching about a game failing with over 4M copies bought. Most people would be happy to have a game be a 500000 or a million seller at that.

[Damm64]

Well when you're huge ass company expending about 20+ million dollars on development and advertising of one game, you do it to earn money not to break even. Still about half the budget of the tomb raider reboot was ONLY advertising... do you really need to expend all that money?

What i really find funny is that Square will never say that a final fantasy game didn't met sales expectations. Im pretty sure that FF XV a game that has been worked, changed since 2006 will ever make a lot of profit. You can also se that trend of games selling less and less with the FF XIII saga with lightning returns barely selling over 1M units.

http://www.vgchartz.com/game/70939/ligh ... tasy-xiii/

[Sarge]

If the VGChartz numbers are to be believed (a stretch, I know), then Mankind Divided definitely didn't sell much considering its AAA status. I know the expected numbers on the first Tomb Raider reboot were pretty outrageous, but only hitting 550,000910,000 on Deus Ex? That hurts.

I would expect sales to dip on FFXIII. The Internet very much turned out that set of games (in some ways for good reason, in some not as much), so it's not surprising that a set of "sequels" that were probably never intended as anything more than recouping costs on that engine showed flagging sales as each one released. I've got money that says FFX-2 also didn't sell as well.

I'd say FFXV is selling pretty well, if that 3.86M number as of Dec. 24 is to be believed. That's a big chunk in a very short time!

[Stark]

There's a TR game already being worked on, that's weird if it gets shelved. Also the last 4 games from those two franchises have been super good, so hopefully that means Marvel games will be good too.

[isiolia]

One caveat with VGChartz is that they can only go on sales numbers that get released. Since Steam (at least) doesn't release those, their PC numbers tend to be low.

[Sarge]

S-E should just let us know, then, but I doubt they really want to divulge that info.

[isiolia]

You can still kinda-sorta find numbers. For instance, VGChartz says that the PC version of Mankind Divided sold about 60k units, and only in Europe. Of course, it's a Steamworks game, with no retail version on PC in most regions. So, you can go look on SteamSpy and see that it shows up in approximately 575,000 users libraries, likely making it the most popular platform for the game (VGChartz claims 550k on PS4). 'course, even the console numbers may only reflect retail sales too, I dunno.

If you look at Human Revolution though, which did have a boxed PC release (albeit one that still needed to use Steam), VGChartz says it sold almost 600k copies. Still quite far from the 1.5M copies recorded in people's libraries, of course.

More or less, I think VGChartz is probably pretty reliable for hardware sales, since you can't download a car PS4. Software seems like it needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

[Forlorn Drifter]

Advertising is an interesting point, I heard next to nothing about Mankind Divided until it was out, and even then very little.