Tomb Raider meets Square Enix’s lofty sales expectations after all

Lara Croft had to overcome a number of obstacles in her latest game, but the biggest challenge was probably publisher Square Enix‘s sales projections — but it looks like she is going to succeed.

The Tomb Raider reboot is a year old, and Square Enix is celebrating by revealing that the game is a financial success. The publisher confirmed the game is on pace to sell 6 million units and will make more profit than it originally anticipated. This is in comparison to what the company was saying in May, when it pointed a finger at games like Tomb Raider and Sleeping Dogs as reasons it lost $134 million in revenue for its last fiscal year. Last month, Square Enix released Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition for Xbox One and PlayStation 4, and that version helped put the Indian Jones-style action-adventure title over the top.

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“By the end of this month, we will surpass 6 million units for our Tomb Raider reboot,” Square Enix head of studios Darrell Gallagher wrote in a blog. “Having achieved profitability back in 2013, Tomb Raider has exceeded profit expectations and continues to make significant contributions to our overall financial performance.”

Following Tomb Raider’s March 2013 release, Square Enix entered a rocky financial period. It reported that substantial revenue loss for the year, but president Yoichi Wada also resigned from his post just weeks after Lara Croft hit Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC. The company went into restructuring and sold off some of its underperforming free-to-play games.

During its May fiscal report, Square Enix revealed that it had sold 4 million copies of Tomb Raider. That made it one of the best-selling games in the franchise’s history, and it was outpacing all of its predecessors. Yet the Japanese publisher was still disappointed in its performance. Gamers and industry observers widely criticized Square Enix for putting such lofty expectations on a game franchise that did not have a Call of Duty-level sales pedigree.

But now the Tomb Raider reboot has met those expectations. Developer Crystal Dynamics is working on a sequel, and we’ll have to see what Square Enix expects this time around.