Tomb Raider was in a similar situation. It eventually limped to its goal.
And this is exactly the thing.
When does MD need to hit its sales goal? Obviously, sooner is better, because the sooner a game becomes profitable, the better. Presumably it needs to hit its goal during this financial year, but we are still 7 months (?) away from the end of Squenix's FY, and Christmas and Thanksgiving have yet to hit. So there's time yet... And this assumes they don't care about long-tail revenue particularly, which is silly.
"Ah!" I hear you cry "But poor early sales will mean no future installments of the franchise!"
Sure.
Maybe. It all depends really.
Look at Hitman. Blood Money was released in 2006. Astounding early sales of 1.6m in about 2 months, according to the
Wiki. By 2011, it had sold more than 2.1m lifetime. But by then, Absolution was well into development (released 2012). By March 2013 (again according to the
Wiki), Absolution had sold 3.6m copies at retail, failing to hit predicted sales targets. But this poor showing did not prevent the development and release of a further Hitman game.
So, even a critical and commercial failure like Absolution didn't kill the franchise, and with good word-of-mouth from the new Hitman game, people new to the franchise who enjoy it will be going back to purchase the older games that they missed out on. Yes, early sales (especially from Squenix, who are famous for racing-to-zero on their non-FF franchises) are important. But the industry is now healthy enough that the less stock we put into first-month sales, the more we can intelligently look at the industry and its consumer-base. The industry is moving more towards long-tail revenue (on the whole), so why shouldn't we examine the industry with that in mind?