Saints Row: The Third touches the 5.5 million sales milestone

By: Muhammad Qasim Hassan

  |   December 19th, 2012   |  

News

Company president claims open-world action game hit the 5.5 million mark in sales, calling it an unrecognised hit.

THQ has finally gotten itself an excuse to open a bottle of champagne and get a taste of joy as its open-world action game Saints Row: The Third reaches a new sales milestone.

Released in November for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC in mid-November last year, the game has gone on to sell 5.5 million copies.

THQ president Jason Rubin shared the figure with his followers on Twitter and at the same time pointed out that reaching such an impressive sales figure makes some things pretty obvious.

He asserted that the third title in the Saints Row was a hit even though it failed to get recognised as one by the critics.

“5.5 million people (pre Humble Bundle) can’t be wrong,” Rubin said. “Saints Row was the hit nobody realized was a hit!”

There are certain things that are not clear about the 5.5 million sales that the game made. Firstly, it has not been mentioned by the company if the figure quoted represents copies sold through to consumers or if it represents copies of games shipped to retailers.

Secondly, no mention of the Humble THQ Bundle has been made, thus leaving it pretty unclear if the 5.5 million copies of Saints Row: The Third takes the sales made through the unprecedented offer that the game made last month.

Despite a couple of ambiguities surrounding the sales milestone reached by the most-recent Saints Row game, it is hard to deny the fact that the game has indeed performed exceptionally well in the market and that too at a time when THQ needed it the most.

The publisher has been going through a pretty rough time over the last few years, with its financial situation evidently so bad that the game has been barely hanging on.

While some analyst were convinced that the company would have declared bankruptcy by the end of this year, others are strongly of the opinion that it will meet the same fate as Midway once the next-generation consoles arrive into the game.

The pessimistic predictions regarding the fate of THQ are hardly without merit, as the company is indeed struggling to survive. However, with a huge portfolio of renowned franchises such as Company of Heroes, Saints Row, Darksiders and WWE, it still has a pretty good opportunity of recovering from the seemingly hopeless situation and to prove the analysts wrong.

The publisher is undoubtedly staring at a daunting task, but if it manages to utilise its resources effectively and focuses on quality of its games, gamers are likely to show a positive response and help it regain its former glory.