14 DAY TRIAL // Yoichi Wada, the president of publisher Square Enix, believes that Sleeping Dogs was not actually a sales failure when it launched during the summer, because his own company overestimated the projections it made for the open-world title.
The executive is quoted by Siliconera as saying during a financial briefing, “At the announcement of forecast revisions last week, we talked about Sleeping Dogs as an example of a Western title that started out slow, which seemed to provoke misunderstandings that it was suffering poor sales.”
Square Enix set high sales targets for Sleeping Dogs because it was impressed by the quality that developer United Front Games was able to deliver in the game.
The company believed that gamers would also react to the gameplay of the new title and buy it in order to satisfy their craving for a new Granf Theft Auto type experience.
The game was also affected by the fact that Square Enix is a Japanese company that failed to take into account the longer sales tail associated with such games in the West.
Wada adds, “I am confident that SD would grow to be one of our ten strong IPs, and I am very optimistic for great results in lifetime sales. Just to reiterate, we expected greater revenues from SD in the First Six-Month Period, and what we are seeing now is simply the difference between actual and aggressive projections.”
The development team at United Front Games has not committed to the creation of another Sleeping Dogs game yet.
The entire experience was initially known as True Crime: Hong Kong, but Activision canceled the project because of quality concerns.
Sleeping Dogs mixed a typical undercover policeman story with some fairly interesting brawler elements.
Almost the entire game focuses on close quarters battles and there are enough items to use and enemies to face to keep it all interesting in the long term.