Just how far short of expectations did Square Enix’s console games fall?

Outgoing Square Enix president Yoichi Wada has revealed the exact extent of the publisher’s console game sales disappointments.

As revealed last month, Sleeping Dogs has sold 1.75m units, Hitman: Absolution 3.6m units and Tomb Raider 3.4m units.

Let’s talk about Sleeping Dogs,” Wada said in a financial briefing as reported by Siliconera. We were looking at selling roughly 2-2.5m units in the EUR/NA market based on its game content, genre and Metacritic scores.

In the same way, game quality and Metacritic scores led us to believe that Hitman had potential to sell 4.5-5m units and 5-6m units for Tomb Raider in EUR/NA and Japanese markets combined.

Of course, we want to hedge risk in budgeting these units directly into the forecast, therefore we base the forecast on 80-90 per cent of the total sales potential of each title. However, it is disappointing that our results fell below these marks.”

The exec went on to admit that the publisher’s selling capacity in Europe and, in particular, North America has been far weaker than we ever imagined”.

He also confirmed the cancellation of some Japanese projects that were already in development as well as the closure of its new US casual development studio.