Consolidated financial statements are a great way to lend an air of legitimacy to the job of writing news about games. It means I get to use phrases like "year-to-date", "equity in earnings" and "operating income for the previous fiscal period"—thus sounding like a serious journalist, even when four years of professionally writing about games has left me grossly unable to report on basic real-world journalistic concepts like law, politics, money or the comings and goings of reality TV stars.
That was a long opening paragraph. Sorry. Here's the news: Sega's full-year financial report for the 12-month period ending March 31 shows, in their words, "weak" performance in packaged game software—a category that, confusingly, includes digital PC sales. In total, the publisher sold 12.3 million units, which, while a year-on-year increase, was clearly below their expectations.
Breaking it down further, we can see sales totals for the company's releases. The multiplatform Alien: Isolation, for instance, shifted 2.11 million copies. The PC-only Football Manager 2015, meanwhile, sold 810,000 copies.
It's a shame that Alien: Isolation sold—from a multi-year AAA-project perspective—so little. It's a great interpretation of the Alien formula, and deservedly our game of 2014. Hopefully the less enthusiastic commercial reception won't stop Creative Assembly being able to do more with that team—as a recent job posting suggests they would like to do.
Thanks, GamesIndustry.
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