Analyst: Games like Tomb Raider must sell 5-10 million

Blockbuster titles such as Tomb Raider have to sell in the region of 5-10 million copies to remain profitable, according to games industry analyst Billy Pidgeon.

Yesterday it was announced that Square Enix boss Yoichi Wada was to leave the company after a set of poor financial results.

It was also revealed that the recently released Tomb Raider was expected to have sold 3.4 million copies a month after launch, but that was still less than hoped.

"The AAA market is extremely competitive," Pidgeon said in a note passed to GamesIndustry. "Most of Square Enix's franchises are single player games, which are less popular than multiplayer.

"Square Enix has been a leader in that sector, but now faces stronger competition from multiple publishers, both large and small, including Bethesda, Capcom, Xseed, Atlus and Level 5."

Pidgeon believes that the bigger games cost around $100 million USD to develop, so to be deemed a success they have to shift a lot more copies.

"Square Enix's franchises are well established and require ever-higher production budgets to match and surpass past performance.

"The latest Hitman and Tomb Raider sold in the three million unit range and got Metacritic ratings above 8.

"But for games with development budgets approaching $100 million USD to be truly profitable, ratings have to be above 8.5 and sales need to be in the five to ten million unit range."