The Dev team did their job making a great game. The blame can't be on them
And no-one is blaming the dev team. It's all on Square-Enix as far as I'm concerned for accepting a stupid deal for minor short term gains.
The ones who should feel bad were the decision makers who decide to go exclusive and launching at the very same day of Fallout 4. The whole thing is like a manual to manufacture a sales disaster step by step.
Yep; from reveal to launch this whole thing feels like a disaster and a good way to give the middle finger to the majority of your audience. It should be held as a case study in how not to market and release a game.
"Square are happy with Crystal and Eidos Montreal"
From what i heard, no they are not, Square especially, CD were the ones who have the close relationship with Microsoft, and they worked with Microsoft to put the deal to square.
Hmm. What are your links to CD, if I may ask?
eh, square still bear the blame since they ultimately signed off on the deal, but CD weren't just pawns in some corporate deal behind their backs, they wanted this deal, they got it, do the math if you think square would be happy with the outcome.
CD must have a lot of freedom within S-E if they can orchestrate a deal like that. Did CD approach MS, or did Spencer approach CD in the first instance?
These seriously don't make it sound all that bad. I doubt SE or MS were expecting incredible sales figures after the way things are turned out. From what he's saying, neither company is angry with them which is good news imo because it means a higher chance of getting a sequel.
I don't think anyone can spin these numbers as satisfactory. Square-Enix were disappointed with the first game selling only 3.4 million copies in its opening month. If this game has even sold a fifth or a quarter of that there's no way S-E would be happy with that, regardless of whether MS footed the bill.
So let's imagine an alternate reality where the game launched on both Xbox One, and PS4 at the same time.
Does everyone believe the sales would be much(much) higher just because it would be on the more adopted system?
I think the quarter of the year it came out in was filled with great games that make it hard to justify buying the game over others.
There's no doubt it would have done significantly better had it launched on PS4 and PC at the same time, but on the other hand it would have been S-E publishing it and perhaps they would have been more open to delaying it to a better release window, because releasing it slap bang in the middle of Halo 5, Black Ops 3, Fallout 4, Battlefront, Assassin's Creed, etc probably wasn't a good idea.
I just hope there isn't another deal for the next Tomb Raider game.
There won't be. At most it might have exclusive marketing, but honestly after this mess I wouldn't be surprised if S-E would rather work with Sony than MS next time around.
Is there any way they'd (Square) pull the plug on the PS4 version of the game as a result of poor sales?
I seriously doubt it. Now that the game is built all it needs is to be ported to two other systems, which I can't imagine would need much manpower or money. If they wanted to be really cheap about it, they could even release it digitally on PC and PS4, although in the case of the latter I expect that would definitely result in much lower sales.
That would mean :
-Sales are poor enough
-SE thought of an exit clause in this case (implies they're smart enough)
-MS let SE put such a clause in the contract (implies they're dumb enough)
So chances are very, very slim.
I think you've misunderstood the question. SolidChamp is talking about canning the PS4 version altogether.