Rumor: Tomb Raider Dev Cuts 30 Employees Following 'Disappointing' Sales

Tomb Raider: Underworld developer Crystal Dynamics today slashed 30 employees from its workforce.

Crystal Dynamics owner Eidos earlier today expressed disappointment in the sales of Underworld, which has moved 1.5 million copies worldwide since its release--apparently a figure that did not meet Eidos' internal projects.

[DJ]

LBP sells 1.3 million copies, and is considered a huge success because so few people worked on that project (30 total) and very little money was spent.

Tomb Raider sells 1.5 million copies, and is considered a huge failure because so many people were involved and a huge amount of money was spent.

[Cwalat]

this should come as a lesson for other devs...

when doing a multiplat... never favor a side.

[bomboclaat_gamer]

their choice to put dlc only on xbox 360 had nothing to do with the sales. life is not all about xbox 360 vs ps3. tomb raider is just not very popular anymore. grow up

[dexterwang]

One thing I always wondered is how much of our 60$ for the game is going to the devs?
Even if its 30 bucks, they should have earned over 45million dollars.
With KZ2, a super high production value game is rumored to cost 70 million... How much can tomb raider cost?
The mystery of gaming finances....

[Apocwhen]

I think it was just released at a bad time. It's not a bad game, but it's not fantastic either. The market got saturated with games in November/December. Games like Tomb Raider, Dead Space and Fallout all ended up on the shelves here selling for 19.99 and they are all good games.

[TheTwelve]

No, dude...this game only sold 1.5 across SIX PLATFORMS.

SIX.

This is a whole different situation than with LBP.

Wasn't this the game with exclusive 360 DLC? Looks like they didn't get enough money from Microsoft to save themselves...

12

[LoVeRSaMa]

I know I didn't buy it just because of the 360 DLC crap, same goes with any other game tbh.

I won't be buying games from any sellout Devs anymore [=

Unlucky Tomb Raider, RIP 1996 - 2005ish.

[MGOelite]

if they cant even be bothered to put trophys in the game and for my fellow 360 gamers cant even be bothered to get to same resolution as the ps3 i dont see why anybody would want to buy it

[The Judderman]

Er because its actually a good game. 1.5million sales end Nov to End of Dec is about the same as LBP's and Resistance... so those developers be sacked too then?

[Graphics Whore]

Hard to compare that to a game that got 95% out of 100%.

[TheTwelve]

1.5 million across SIX PLATFORMS.

Big problem.

12

[The Judderman]

Its crazy. And it was actually a good game which makes it even worse.
Resistance also had a big team and sold around the same in the same time frame. If Sony were not covering the development costs the same thing would have happened there. Not a good thing.

[Tryst]

I think you are wrong here. Tomb Raider was developed on 3 platforms (was it also on Wii??). R2 was developed on 1 platform.

I think there were more Tomb Raider devs since they were developing it on many platforms.

Insomniac have two teams who work in parallel. ONe team on Resistance and the other on Rachet and Clank.

[grantps3]

well tomb raider sucks..they should have ended it when it was still good...the only good thing about that game is laura's @ss

[Heldrasil]

The series pretty much sucked after the first one. I am surprised they chose to keep publishing this crap.

[Doppy]

The game sold 1.5 million which is a little more than I would expect a Tomb Raider game to sell, so what were they expecting it to do reach 3 mil. The problem wasn't the game it's just that Tomb Raider hasn't been big since the PS1. Lara Croft just isn't enough to sell this game. Tomb Raider isn't up to par with today's games, its core gameplay foundation is still stuck in the days of PS1, and needs to evolve to be successful.

That being said this Tomb Raider was a decent game. The graphics were good (the areas looked great character models not so much), story was alright, the gameplay while mostly the same was better in some areas, and the exploring was good. But Tomb Raider just can't compare to games like Uncharted, and I think it's time for Lara to retire, and time for the developers to start on something fresh and new.

Warning to all devs. stop relying on sequels of games that were once great, but now should be buried (Sonic is next).

[Sonyslave3]

so what going to happen to dlc for xbox 360

[DARKTRINITYxxx]

Its a great game and i love the tombraider series. But on the other hand i think its thier own fault and i hope it affects the XFLOPS exclusive DLC. Serves em right for jumping on the greedy train when MS got thier wallet out and waved it under thier noses.

[Lord Shuhei Yoshida]

I look forward to the Eidos announcement that they will bring the DLC to the PS3 version to recoup losses on lack of profit from the 360 version.

[thereapersson]

I'm surprised nobody reported this:

http://www.n4g.com/NewsCom-...

This story was published 7 hours ago. The story I linked was published 19 hours ago...

[Danieru sho]

I thnk one reason the title hasnt sold is that with anniversary, one would think that it was the last, what else was there to see from lara, new sommersaults? Can u honestly expect to buy a new game cause now she can flip 50 times in the air? U decide. If eidos had released a tomb raider that implied a sequel, it wud have sold like hotcakes, whch come to think of it, who does buy hotcakes? Anyway, underworld is a whole new game, no link with previous games story wise. I mean look at MGS4. Tomb raider will always be a fun game to play bt perhapz eidos was overconfident. A lesson should be learned, if u want to continue a franchise and ensure its success then dnt release games tht wil imply th end of it cause that resurrection crap wont work. Eidos did the same for hitman 4, and yet if u sniff around, u wil hear of hitman 5...

[Wolfie]

One of the employee said: "Ask anyone who is part of it and if they are honest they will tell you around 40% of the DLC was meant to be in the game itself, originally. But it was decided later on to take out those parts because they were expecting most sales on the 360 and the DLC the way it looked at the time was looking to be a bit 'thin'. However the poor sales for the 360 was a bit of a shock and the 360 exclusive now everyone knows was a huge mistake. Guess what, the guys who made that mistake are still working at Eidos. And Eidos will lose lots of money on it when they release it."

[Tryst]

Where did you get this information from?

[Wolfie]

http://www.tombraiderforums...

[PirateThom]

Lara Croft just isn't relevent anymore.

There's games in the third person action genre that do it better and are more fun to play.

Tomb Raider had its day on the PlayStation, but since the PS2, it just hasn't been able to recapture that, because everyone else seems to have moved on.

I personally think Tomb Raider either needs a major overhaul and complete change to gameplay or to be dropped entirely.

[LeonSKennedy4Life]

What's weird is...people still buy Crash games...despite the fact that they SUCK MISERABLY!!!

It was the same period as Tomb Raider. I guess Crash was just the more popular series though.

I certainly loved it until Naughty Dog stopped making them.

[tudors]

lets forget about PS3 V Xbox-360 but do focus on KZ2 and Gears of War 2, put simply some devs are trying to go that extra mile whilst others are happy to try to con the public into buying the same crap over and over without any real improvements, yes it's an ok game but nothing new.

[zag]

I honestly don't think any of these games really cost much more than a few million.

I can't ever figure out how a game could cost 70million dollars it's not like a movie where your desgining and building real life sets etc and need people with the know how etc.

Most games are made in 2 years 1 year of hard core codeing/gfxs and the 2nd year for tieing up loose ends and some testing then out the door.

Making the games isn't that hard really if you have the know how to build a 3D engine/world then you can make the world up pretty quick.

3D artist could use clay models then 3d scan them into the game or you just spend a day or 2 doing up the model.

People do have time slots for stuff that has to be done by it's not like you can spend 3 years trying to come up with a 3d engine/world then another 3 years on 3d models.

I reckon the game has cost 5 million them say for any over heads but meant to make 70 million by the share holders and it's bombed out.

I'd say it was sold on the wring platform 360 seems to only sell select genres of games and the rest don't fair well, even GTA4 never sold too hot on the 360.

selling 1.5million copies at $60 = 90 million dollars back so it's not like they haven't made their money back but shareholders probably expected more cash to roll in.

Maybe the DLC/360 contract hasn't worked out money wise.

In Australia Tomb radier is sold as a PS3 game not a 360 game.

[The Judderman]

GTA4 actually sold very well on the 360, more than the Ps3 and lots of sub genres sell very well on the 360 also.
I do agree with you about the share holders though. Its probably right that the game cost around 5mill but they were expecting more profit for share holders. Damn those shareholders.

[Tiberium]

Exactly the reason why the 360 should be the lead SKU. Developers take note.