Rise Of The Tomb Raider Slips And Falls In UK Launch

Lara Croft’s latest has gotten off to a bit of a stinker in the UK. The timed Xbox exclusive arrived last week to rave reviews, but that hasn’t been enough to lift it out of sales mediocrity. Rise of the Tomb Raider shifted just 57,600 copies across both Xbox One and Xbox 360.

I think the reason for this is that Rise of the Tomb Raider arrived at the wrong time. With 482,000 UK gamers picking up Fallout 4 on day one, and sandwiched between Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate and Star Wars Battlefront, there wasn’t room for another title. Ultimately, it was Crystal Dynamics' title which lost out. A lot of the blame for this launch failure has to come down to Microsoft themselves. Microsoft’s own head of marketing Aaron Greenberg said a fortnight ago that they deliberately chose the date to avoid going head-to-head with Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 and Star Wars Battlefront, saying “We felt like the Fallout audience…they are not direct competitors per se, but you are right…it’s two big titles launching at the same time and we hope people will buy both.” It feels as if they totally underestimated the popularity of Fallout 4 (which is often considered the biggest game of the year), which has sold up to 12 million copies already.

It’s not good news for the future the Tomb Raider franchise that’s for sure, but there’s plenty of time between now and Christmas for Microsoft to shift a few more units on Xbox One. There’s also the PC and PlayStation 4 launches to look forward to in 2016, but they’re unlikely to have the same impact as they would have if they were launched concurrently.

One person who’s sure it’ll be fine is Paul Rustchynsky, game director at DriveClub developer Evolution Studios, who tweeted out it’ll find more success on its re-launch next year.