Paradox has blamed poor Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 sales on the game sitting outside of its core area of gaming expertise, which apparently made it difficult for the company to gauge commercially what the game would do.
Paradox boss Frederik Wester made the remarks in a statement alongside the company announcing a SEK 355m (approximately £28m) write-down for development costs of the game – a loss of sorts.
“Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 is a strong vampire fantasy and we are pleased with the developers’ work on the game,” Wester said in a Paradox press release. “We’ve had high expectations for a long time, since we saw that it was a good game with a strong IP in a genre with a broad appeal.
“A month after release we can sadly see that sales do not match our projections, which necessitates the write-down. The responsibility lies fully with us as the publisher. The game is outside of our core areas, in hindsight it is clear that this has made it difficult for us to gauge sales.
“Going forward, we focus our capital to our core segments and, at the same time, we’ll evaluate how we best develop World of Darkness’ strong brand catalogue in the future.”
“We’ll evaluate how we best develop World of Darkness’ strong brand catalogue in the future”
Sales figures for Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 haven’t been announced, but GameDiscover.co estimates (seen by GamesIndustry.biz) suggest as few as 121,500 copies have been sold, amounting to something like £3m in revenue. That’s nowhere near enough to recoup development costs; remember, Bloodlines 2 was in development for a long time, having initially been announced in 2019 before being scrapped and repurposed by a different developer, which lead to the Bloodlines 2 version we have now.
Wester followed his remarks by promising to deliver the two post-release Bloodlines 2 story expansions, access to which was sold in deluxe editions of the game – replacing the previously planned access to two of the game’s six vampire clans. One of these story add-ons will focus on aggressive vampire sheriff Benny Muldoon, and the other will focus on worshipped Nightclub-owning vampire Ysabella Moore.
“Our post-release plan remains firm,” said Wester. “We will deliver updates and the promised expansions to the game in the coming year.”
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Paradox’s apology-of-sorts coincides with the former boss of Bloodlines 2 developer The Chinese Room, Dan Pinchbeck, revealing that the project had a fundamental naming problem. Calling the game Bloodlines 2 set unrealistic expectations of what the game would be, he said. “We used to sit there and have these planning sessions of how do we get them [publisher Paradox] to not call it Bloodlines 2,” Pinchbeck said. Evidently, those discussions never went any further, and I wonder whether if they had, the situation Paradox finds itself in might have been avoided.
It’s not the first time Paradox has talked about risks associated with straying from its core field of strategy game expertise. Ed spoke to Paradox execs Mattias Lilja and Henrik Fåhraeus about exactly this matter late last year – and about refocusing to rebuild trust and to survive.”We do want to take risks,” Lilja said. “We want to try new things. But we need to be much more disciplined about it than we’ve been. The further from the core, the lower the investment should be.”
Fåhraeus even referenced Bloodlines 2 during that conversation, saying, “Bloodlines is probably the last to come from that [old] strategy. It’s quite far from our core area, it’s an outlier… but again, we want to release the best game we can. It’s a tall order to measure up to a cult classic.”
But name-based expectations weren’t the only reason Bloodlines 2 struggled. Even judged as a linear action game, which is what it is, it falls down in several areas, and ends up feeling hollow and forgettable as an overall experience. Check out my full Vampire: The Bloodlines 2 review for more.
