Sega Disappointed with "Weak Sales" For Alien: Isolation?

Numbers are everything for some companies, as they show how well you are doing, or how badly you are failing. In terms of video game companies, specifically software companies, numbers show how well you did with the games you made, or how far below expectations you are. Yet sometimes, these expectations are incredibly high, and thus when the results are seen, it makes you wonder why they set that high a standard in the first place.

For Sega, they recently released their financial results for the past year (via IGN) (which for them ended on March 30), and though their sales of physical copies of games were up 41%, they were really disappointed with how some of their games did.

Key among them was Alien: Isolation, which has sold 2.1 million copies to date. This is incredibly curious that Sega finds that “weak,” as some games never reach the one million sales mark in their lifetimes, let alone two. The curiosity continues when you find out that Sonic Boom (a game widely reviled by all who played it) has only sold a little over 620,000. So Alien: Isolation has sold four times that, yet is still considered a failure.

It’s unclear what may be next for some of Sega’s titles, especially since they’re set to release a bunch of free-to-play mobile and PC games in the next year. Hopefully if they do make more big name games, they won’t put too much of an expectation on them, so they enjoy the sales they do get.