Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2, developed by UK studio The Chinese Room and published by Paradox Entertainment, was released on 21 October, and failed to really sink its teeth into a good place to settle. It soon became apparent that the game was not what fans of the first game from 2004 had hoped for, and mixed reviews soon pushed the title into the oblivion pile.
A month later, it's time to take real stock of this release, and the data reflects the difficult debut. Data from GameDiscoverCo (thank you, Gamesindustry.biz) claims that only around 150,000 copies of the game have been sold on Steam, amounting to around $4 million in net profit. This has led Paradox to announce a write-off for Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 of $37 million. Despite this, both they and The Chinese Room maintain that the game's two promised expansions will be released.
Frederik Wester, CEO of Paradox, took responsibility to his investors: "Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 is a strong vampire fantasy and we are pleased with the developers' work on the game," he said in a statement. "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."
The development of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 has been plagued with problems since Paradox took over the IP in 2015. A change of studio, several delays and changes in direction meant that the project was on the verge of disappearing before its release. By the time it finally happened, there was little hope left with it. Let's hope that this situation and Paradox's honest statement does not mean that The Chinese Room will have to bear human costs.