Pachter: Microsoft Probably Paid $10 Million Or More For Rise of the Tomb Raider Xbox Exclusivity

When one speaks about the exclusives that Microsoft has, one of those big exclusives is Rise of the Tomb Raider, and everyone’s debated about how this is actually going to make a difference in sales. In a recent interview with Michael Pachter, GamingBolt asked him the reason behind Square Enix’s decision to make it a timed exclusive to Xbox One, given that it’s still playing catch up with the PS4, as far as sales go.

“Back in 2007-09, when Rob Dyer was the head of third-party relations at Sony. He told me that Microsoft was paying publishers for these one month exclusives, and the most famous was the Call of Duty map packs that always came out 30 days early on the Xbox 360. And Rob said the amounts they were paying were ridiculous and Sony wasn’t able to match and get them the same day. Sony had to outbid Microsoft to get thirty days early, and he said it wasn’t worth it.”

“I think he turned out to be wrong. He’s not there anymore, but I think he turned out to be wrong, and I think Microsoft continues to use that trick to pay up for limited time exclusives, and so whatever they payed Square Enix, I’m sure Square Enix did the math and feels that they’re whole.”

“They’re going to sell, probably, a few less units on the PlayStation and a few more units on the Xbox, but the amount of money they got up front offsets whatever the net loss in sales is. And Microsoft is probably paying millions of dollars. Probably not hundreds of millions of dollars, but probably as much as ten million dollars, maybe more.”

Rise of the Tomb Raider comes out exclusively for the Xbox One and Xbox 360 later this year. Stay tuned for our full interview with Pachter in the coming days.