Well, it's true that they didn't consider Tomb Raider a good enough success either after it sold far more than Sleeping Dogs. But my assumption came with a secondary assumption (yeah, I know) that these games weren't profitable because their development was kinda troubled.
We know the story behind Sleeping Dogs and why that would've had to be a monster success to make its money back all the way, but...are we really at the point where a game under normal circumstances sells 2+ million and it still can't be considered profitable?
Holy fuck this industry is screwed.
SD came at a time when the industry, specifically the Japanese side, put ludicrous demands in terms of sales for their games. Capcom, for one, wanted far too much for far too little, and ended up fucking themselves for it.
By the time things swung around, which is like in the past few years or so, UFGs was already doing other things or SE simply wasn't interested in a sequel. I'm sure a subpar remaster didn't help chances either.
There's a reason we see so few AAA $60 games these days...
There's also the catch that these games have to be making a pretty good profit to be worthwhile. You don't want to invest $40+ million to earn $2 million in profit. You'd be much better off just dumping your money in the stock market.
Given the astronomical risk involved in making a game in the failure case, you want some big returns in the success case.
Yeah, unless you plan on slicing costs heavily, getting another source of revenue either through DLC or by being games-as-a-service, or some other buffer like taking the hit to establish a franchise, games need to be profitable. They always had to be for the most part, but with rising costs, it's harder and harder to justify ones that aren't big sellers, much less take risks.
I think it's getting better, since who the fuck was going to buy a niche game like Nier 2 but somehow SE is bankrolling it, but it's not a problem solved overnight.