Saints Row: The 2022 reboot would have achieved the worst sales in the history of the franchise | Xbox

Great love stories don't always stand the test of time. Launched in the mid-2000s by the Volition studio, the Saints Row franchise has enjoyed great success with players, mainly thanks to its four main episodes released between 2006 and 2013. If “secondary” opuses were released until 2017, the license was then put to sleep before being awakened in 2022 with the appearance of a reboot that it would perhaps have been better never to release.

Saints Row 2022: a reboot that rhymes with bankruptcy

It's not very flattering to say that, but the disclosure of sales figures for the latter must certainly leave a very bitter taste among the developers of Volition. Known for digging up important information on our favorite media, user Timur 222 shared a very interesting screenshot from the Linkedin account of Tyrin Stevenson, former head of community and social media at Volition.

Reading this allows us to learn that the Saints Row reboot would have only sold 1.7 million copies worldwide, which would make it the worst-selling game throughout the history of the saga.

For comparison, Saints Row The Third is the best-selling game with over 5.5 million copies, while Saints Row 2 has sold 3.4 million copies. The first opus of the series, released only on Xbox 360, sold more than 2 million copies.

If the figures concerning Saints Row 4 are not known, we nevertheless know that the title sold more than a million copies during its first week during 2013. Knowing this, it is therefore almost a given that Saints Row 4 sold over 1.7 million copies in its first year of operation.

As a reminder, the Saints Row reboot received mixed reviews when it launched, particularly due to bugs and a lack of variety. It currently has scores ranging from 61 to 65 on the review aggregation site Metacritic.

In addition, Lars Wingefors, CEO of the late Embracer, said he was personally disappointed by the reception given to the game during the group's annual general meeting in September 2022:

Personally, I was hoping the game would be better received. It has been very polarized. There are a lot of things that could be said in detail about this, but on the one hand I'm happy to see that many players and fans are happy, and at the same time I'm a little sad to see that fans aren't happy, so it's difficult.

Biggest failure of the franchise or not, this reboot still caused the closure of Volition a few months later.