14 DAY TRIAL // Rise of the Tomb Raider was an Xbox One exclusive, and it didn’t do all that well in December, but Microsoft finally revealed that the game managed to sell over a million copies.
Microsoft has been rather quiet about the Rise of the Tomb Raider sale and was usually content to just say that it did well. No numbers were released, but the game didn’t even make it onto the NPD list of retail games for December, and that’s usually not a good indication. A good performance for the game means that it’s likely to see sequels, but there is a part of the exclusive deals that usually covers this.
When Microsoft decided to offer Xbox One exclusivity for Rise of the Tomb Raider, they probably made Square Enix an offer they couldn’t refuse. They must have paid them enough to cover the losses they would incur by ditching the other platforms, so it’s quite likely that we’ll see a sequel even if it didn’t sell extraordinarily on Xbox One.
1 million copies it not good or bad
If we keep in mind that Rise of the Tomb Raider launched in the same day with Fallout 4, then we can surmise that a million units sold are not all that bad, although it’s still interesting to see that they’ve waited so long to reveal a simple number.
“Every title in our exclusive 2015 holiday games line-up – Halo 5: Guardians, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Forza Motorsport 6 and Gears of War: Ultimate Edition – sold over 1 million units, and the number of Xbox One gamers who played Microsoft Studios-published titles more than doubled compared to 2014,” Mike Nichols, the corporate vice president of Marketing for Xbox, explained in a post.
The good news is that the Xbox One exclusive for Rise of the Tomb Raider is one of the shortest we’ve seen. The game is scheduled for a January launch on Steam, which means that the exclusivity only lasted for a couple of months.