Well, I don't know them for a fact but:
- Xbone sales were below 20kk when Halo 5 hits (There are even people arguing that even by the years end it didn't reached it). Expecting sales higher than 25% of your user base is quite unrealistic, even if a previous game of the franchise did it (and they know Halo 3 was the peak). How realistic is that they expected to sell that much more than 5 million to a point where 5 million is way behind their expectations?
- Same for xbone itself. Ms had no other console that sold that much, and neither sony was expecting Ps4 to sell at higher than Ps2 rates. How it was realistic that 40M was an actual target for Ms?
- Minecraft had sold about 50M when Ms bought it, it has now doubled its sales to 100M+. Again completely unrealistic to expect to sold just as much in 2 years than it took 5 years to reach. in 2014 Minecraft sold at about 14k units per day, now it's over 53k daily. Again, how realistic it is to buy a franchise that sells a ton, see their daily sales quadruple in two years and still be way behind any reasonable projection?
- How realistic it is for a Lionhead employee to know projections and sales for all things Ms even the ones that have nothing to do with Lionhead? I would assume that anyone that worked for Lionhead in a position to know that, would value that position and not leak data and face a NDA lawsuit.