Rocksteady's Batman: Arkham City sold 12.5 million copies and generated over $600 million (£469 million), according to the LinkedIn profile of a Warner Bros.' employee.
As spotted by our friends at PC Gamer, the eagle-eyed Twitter user @bogorad222 spotted the statistics not on a press release but on the LinkedIn profile of a former global franchise marketing manager who worked for the publisher at the time.
Batman: Arkham City sold 12.5 million units, generated $600+ million in revenue.The last reported figure was 6 million shipped by February 2012.https://t.co/lBdDrVFosH pic.twitter.com/TWPfwJjMUdJuly 25, 2020
While the sales figures were never formally shared publically, the profile states that the employee "strategically marketed a AAA life-cycle campaign to deliver over 12.5m units", and "cross-divisional franchise management driving $600 million in revenue". The profile further adds that they "managed co-marketing partnership valued $5 million".
The last figures we can find online came in February 2012 courtesy of Gamespot, that said the sequel had shipped six million copies within the first four months after its release in October 2011. Now it seems Arkham City has more than doubled that in its first year, "delivering" – which might not be precisely the same as "selling", of course – 12.5 million by 2012. It remains unclear how many copies the game has sold over its lifetime.
Batman: Arkham City was the follow-up to the critically-acclaimed Batman: Arkham Asylum and went on to become a critical darling in its own right, too, averaging a critic Metacritic score of 91 on PC, 94 on Xbox 360, and 96 on PlayStation 3. The 12DOVE review also loved the action-adventure game, awarding it the much-coveted 5/5 score and stating: "Batman: Arkham Asylum was the greatest superhero game of all time. The sequel, Batman: Arkham City, is five times bigger and about a billion times better. You do the math".
"There’s so little space and so much more to admire," we wrote at the time. "The epic, soaring music. The arguably greatest graphics of the year. The predictably stellar voice acting, but with a particularly perverse performance by Mark Hamill as the Joker and especially enjoyable take by Nolan North on the Penguin."
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