UK charts show that Microsoft chose a poor launch date for Rise of The Tomb Raider on Xbox One, releasing it in the same week as Fallout 4, which caught all the attention.
The previous Tomb Rider title was released in 2013 and brought three times as many orders. Two years ago, gamers purchased 183,000 copies of the Tomb Raider reboot, while only 63,000 units sold at retail in 2015.
Reviews of Rise of The Tomb Raider were positive to say the least, but launching the game on the same day as the hyped and long-expected Fallout 4 was like wrestling a Deathclaw with the bare hands at level 1. It did not help that Rise of The Tomb Raider came out exclusively on Xbox One and Xbox 360, either.
Chris Brown, product manager at Sony, stated his dissatisfaction with the events on Twitter and pointed out that Fallout 4 registered great success even without Microsoft's backing.
"Poor Tomb Raider. UK Sales: Rise of the Tomb Raiedr <63k," Brown noted on Twitter. "And Fallout 4 - despite Microsoft Xbox One support - still sold better on PS4."
Brown acknowledged that Rise of The Tomb Raider's problem resided with the bad timing of the game's launch. He further noted that it was a crowded period of the year, when important releases came one after another.
@jezpotter I think that's it: releasing the same week as Fallout. But when do you release it. COD/Star Wars/Halo 5 all back-to-back. — Chris Brown (@That_Kid_Chris) November 16, 2015
Fans of PlayStation 4 were pleasantly surprised by a reply from Evolution Studio's Paul Rustchynsky. Evolution Studios is in charge of developing the PS4 Exclusive DriveClub.
@That_Kid_Chris Don't worry Tomb Raider will do just fine next year when it's released on PS4 next year ;) — Paul Rustchynsky (@Rushy33) November 16, 2015
Even if the gaming community might have lost out by ignoring Rise of The Tomb Raider, the developer and publisher have an important lesson to take home: poorly-timed exclusive deals cause epic failures in the gaming market. So unless they purposely want to lose money and gamers' interest, avoiding such scenarios might be best.
The UK charts generally are a pretty good indicator of how a game will fare, so there is little hope that gamers in other parts of the world will flock to buy Rise of The Tomb Raider instead of Fallout 4.
