Square Enix says Guardians of the Galaxy ‘undershot expectations’

Square Enix has stated that sales of its Guardians of the Galaxy game “undershot initial expectations”.

In newly-published presentation slides following its results briefing held earlier this month, the company’s president Yosuke Matsuda stated that the game hasn’t sold as well as hoped, even though it had reviewed well.

“Despite strong reviews, the game’s sales on launch undershot our initial expectations,” Matsuda said.

“However, sales initiatives that we kicked off in November 2021 and continued into the new year have resulted in sales growth, and we intend to work to continue to expand sales to make up for the title’s slow start.”

This is the second time Square Enix has expressed unhappiness at the initial sales of a Marvel-licensed game.

In November 2021, Matsuda said Square Enix needed to learn from the “disappointing” performance of Marvel’s Avengers, claiming that developer Crystal Dynamics was a bad fit given its lack of experience with the games as a service model.

Guardians of the Galaxy is a single-player, story-driven, third-person action-adventure game which was developed by Eidos Montreal, and was released on October 26, 2021 for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and PC.

Worked on in collaboration with Marvel, it sees players take on the role of Star-Lord in “an original and authentic experience” inspired by over 50 years of Guardians of the Galaxy lore, according to Square Enix.

The game was released to a generally positive reception – the Xbox Series X version currently has a score of 84 on Metacritic, while the PS5 version has a score of 80.

The game was also released on Switch, albeit as a cloud version that was streaming-only. This version was significantly less well-received, with a Metacritic score of 58.