GarthLordOfTheSith said: Tells me their expectations were too high.



Didn’t the TR reboot sell gangbusters but still come in below squares ridiculous expectations a while ago? Click to expand... Click to shrink...

Sales expectations are not "ridiculous". The mentality that they are "ridiculous" stems from the gaming community in general refusing to accept that games cost more and more and more and more to make and to market in a vicious cycle. This armchair "publishers are stupid and incompetent" mentality proffered by people who've never handled that kind of stress and responsibility in their lives. Publishers spend 100+ million on a game. And the game doesn't give the return on investment they were hoping for. That's a problem. Game development is constant gambling. Spending huge amounts of money in the hope you'll make a healthy return. There's also the need to cover for games that flop terribly. For example, Sleeping Dogs badly, badly underperformed, and while TR2013 and Hitman: Absolution sold way better, they weren't enough to fill in the gap.Shadow of the Tomb Raider cost between 75-100 million dollars to develop. It had a 35 million dollar marketing budget. That's what it costs to create cinematic third person shooters with AAA production values, scope, etc.Remember that Crystal Dynamics ran into strife with the LAU Trilogy. Underworld sold around 2.5 million, IIRC. And that resulted in a huge chunk of the Underworld team being fired. Imagine how much game budgets have climbed between 2008 and 2019. Remember that Epic sold Gears because Gears 1 cost them 12 million, but Gears 4 was going to cost 100+ million.Also, the same people who complain about advertising budgets and claim that publishers are stupid and wasting money, also complain about publishers supposedly "sabotaging" games by "not spending anything on advertising".