Tomb Raider’s crossed the line this time and I don’t know what to do about it. Usually that sort of behaviour is cause to just walk away but in Tomb Raider’s case, the line it crossed, there’s no going back. There will never be a time when that game isn’t profitable because “by the end of last year,” executive producer Scott Amos told Eurogamer, “Tomb Raider is in the black. We’ve crossed the line of profitability.”
“Expectations can get shifted so quickly it’s difficult to know what realistic even means anymore,” Amos said, talking about the sales targets for Tomb Raider. Square Enix had suggested the game would sell between 5 and 6 million copies in its first month. It sold 3.4 million copies and was considered, in the light of those targets, a failure by the company.
That doesn’t mean the reboot is the last stop for Crystal Dynamics. “Clearly Square and Crystal are invested in the franchise,” Amos says. “So, despite how it was said, what was said – we had a lot of people scratching their heads and asking about it – we’re very happy to say that from a partnership internally, we’re committed to it totally. Square Enix talks about it as a key franchise, so we’re very happy with where we’re at.”
This support allowed the studio to start work on a sequel immediately. “The story of what Tomb Raider was in 2013, that was what we wanted,” said Amos. “We had the world and setting and fiction where we wanted it to be. And that’s when we started moving the team over to the next story, the sequel.”
You can read the full interview over at Eurogamer.