Paradox Admits Losing Millions on Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2
The publisher has taken full responsibility for the game's poor performance.
A month after the disastrous release of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, publisher Paradox Interactive has issued an official statement essentially admitting it lost millions of dollars on the sequel's development.
Paradox
Based on a revised sales forecast, the publisher has decided to "make a non-cash write-down of MSEK 355 (around $37.5 million) of capitalised development costs" for Bloodlines 2 in the fourth quarter, meaning, when tranlslated from corpo-speech to plain English, the company had spent this money creating the sequel and expected to earn it back from the game's sales but, seeing its performance, has now admitted those millions are basically lost.
That comes on top of SEK 346 million ($36.5 million) Paradox had already planned to subtract this quarter as part of "scheduled degressive amortisation," a.k.a. the game's value declining over time, leaving only "MSEK 40 ($4.2 million) of the capitalised development costs" on the balance sheet after all the reductions.
Despite the game's failure being due not to poor marketing but to elements developer The Chinese Room was responsible for, like janky combat, performance issues, an empty world, uninspired quests, and Bloodlines 2 simply not being an RPG, Paradox has taken full responsibility, stating that the blame for its poor financial performance rests with them as the publisher.
"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," commented Paradox CEO Fredrik Wester. "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."
Unfortunately, the publisher hasn't disclosed just how many copies Bloodlines 2 has sold, leaving analysts to make their own estimates.
Gamalytic reports that the game has sold only around 120,000 copies on Steam, which at $60 each, minus Steam's 30% cut, comes to roughly $5 million, probably slightly more thanks to the Deluxe and Premium editions. Of course, the game also made some money on PlayStation and Xbox, but whatever it earned there, the write-down makes it clear beyond any doubt that it wasn't enough.
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