Paradox announces a $37 million write-down following the failure of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2
, by Thibaut
Poorly received by critics, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 was also poorly received by gamers. Paradox Interactive reviewed its financial results and highlighted the commercial failure of the project.
The publisher confirmed that the game's failed launch resulted in a $37 million write-down of the software's development costs. According to new data, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 sold 121,500 copies on Steam. This equates to approximately $4 million in revenue.
In a statement, Frederik Wester, CEO of Paradox, took full responsibility for his company's failure.
"Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 is a strong vampire fantasy and we are pleased with the developers’ work on the game. 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."
Source: gamesindustry.biz