Paradox takes $37 million write-down after Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 misses targets

Paradox has announced it is writing down SEK 355 (around $37 million) of development costs for Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, after early sales figures fell short of expectations following mixed reviews. The company said it would still deliver the two planned expansions to the game.

Data from GameDiscoverCo suggests the game sold 121,500 copies on Steam, which would amount to net revenue of around $4 million. The game currently has “mixed” reviews on the platform and on Metacritic.

CEO Frederik Wester took it on the chin. “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.”

Paradox initially greenlit the game after acquiring the IP in 2015, with Hardsuit Labs making something closer to the cult-favourite 2004 original. That title was due to ship in 2020, but Paradox terminated its deal with Hardsuit after two delays and the removal of Ka’ai Cluney and Brian Mitsoda, the senior creatives on the project. UK-based studio The Chinese Room then took over the project, ultimately delivering a tighter narrative experience compared to the sprawling RPG original, which received a lukewarm response from players and critics.

The studio had anticipated the blowback from fans based on the game’s deviation from the original’s formula, with former creative director Dan Pinchbeck telling the Goth Boss podcast of their attempts to ditch the name entirely.

“The tricky question around it was Bloodlines 1,” Pinchbeck said. “Are you making a sequel to Bloodlines 1? We used to sit there and have these planning sessions of how do we get them to not call it Bloodlines 2? That feels like the most important thing we do here, to come at this and say this isn’t Bloodlines 2. We can’t make Bloodlines 2; there’s not enough time, there’s not enough money.”

In Paradox’s most recent trading update, the company reported a 20% increase in operating profit for the first nine months of the year, and said that Q4 will be “likely be the most intense period in Paradox’s history,” driven by three game launches and updates to many of its core titles.