Square Enix publicized that it would be divesting its popular Tomb Raider franchise for $300 million and investing the proceeds into blockchain, AI and cloud computing technologies.
Since its inception in 1996, the Tomb Raider franchise has sold more than 88 million units. About 40% of the sales came from the franchise’s rebooted trilogy consisting of Tomb Raider, Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadows of the Tomb Raider, while the rest came from sales of the original game. Additionally, the franchise saw over 53 million paid mobile downloads from games such as Lara Croft: Relic Run.
Yosuke Matsuda, the CEO of Square Enix, revealed plans for blockchain, metaverse and NFT integration at the beginning of the year. Specifically, the CEO sees the development of play-to-earn blockchain games as a key pillar of growth for the industry and expects 2022 to be a year with growing hype for the metaverse.
