Square Enix President Stepping Down After ‘Weak’ Tomb Raider, Hitman Sales

Square Enix has had to readjust its projected incomes based on what the publisher is calling weak sales on recently launched titles. As a result, the company's president Yoichi Wada is exiting the company.

The news came from Square financial reports (broken down by Joystiq), where the publisher revealed it would suffer a loss of ¥10 billion (US$106 million) on its forecast for the fiscal year. Wada will be replaced by former company director and CFO Yosuke Matsuda, as per the resolution reached at the annual shareholder's meeting.

Square Enix pointed the finger at Western releases like Tomb Raider and Hitman: Absolution, which it claimed showed "sluggish" sales. Of course, some of the blame must be pinned on Square for having such high, and clearly unattainable, sales projections for such games. Again reported by Joystiq, Square Enix is dubbing Tomb Raider's 3.4 million copies, Hitman: Absolution's 3.6 million copies, and Sleeping Dogs' 1.75 million copies sold as "weak," and cites these three titles as a primary cause of the financial troubles.

That we've reached a time when a game selling more than three million copies is considered a failure is incredibly telling and troubling, and could be a bad omen for the future of console gaming. With companies expecting major returns on AAA titles, the amount of copies that must be sold to return a profit is astronomical, and completely out of reason. Budgets will likely increase for the next console generation, meaning those expectations will be even higher, and the risk of failure even worse.