It’s been a very busy couple of months for Tomb Raider’s developer Crystal Dynamics. They only announced last month that they had just started development on the next entry for the series using the Unreal 5 engine, and just yesterday, they, along with Eidos and Square Enix Montreal, were sold to Embracer Group for around $300 million. Thankfully it looks like Embracer is extremely excited to have lot of these new IPs, especially Tomb Raider, where they emphasized this by announcing a brand new milestone for the series. In a livestream on YouTube, Embracer revealed that the Tomb Raider franchise has now sold more than 88 million units in its entire lifetime, spanning all the way back to 1996.
Breaking down the impressive statistic, the majority of these sales came from the reboot trilogy which began in 2013 with Crystal Dynamics Tomb Raider. This was followed by 2015’s Rise of the Tomb Raider and was then concluded with Eidos’s Shadow of the Tomb Raider in 2018. All three have gone to be critically acclaimed and accounted for 38 million units sold, a rather large portion of the 88 million for the franchise. The other 50 million units all come from various Tomb Raider entries, which include the original titles that were developed by Core Design all the way from 1996 to 2007 and the mobile titles Lara Croft: Relic Run and Lara Croft: GO.
Clearly, Embracer thinks highly of their newly acquired IP, and it also helps that Crystal Dynamics is already busy on the next entry. If it’s anything like their other acquisitions, Embracer will more than likely leave Crystal Dynamics to their own devices and allow them to continue development as they see fit. As for this new achievement for the series, it shows the staying power of both Tomb Raider and its protagonist Lara Croft. Despite many hardships over the years, the character is still a beloved treasure of the video game community, and it looks like it’s going to stay that way.