Bloodlines 2 PS5

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 publisher Paradox Interactive has announced it is writing down $37 million in development costs after sales of the vampire title failed to meet expectations.

It's also taking ownership over the overall release's failure, including the lukewarm critical reception. Paradox Interactive accepts the game is "outside of our core areas", and the "responsibility lies fully with us as the publisher".

The Swedish company shall now "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". It also owns the developers behind games such as Crusader Kings 3, Stellaris, and has just let go of the Cities: Skylines team.

While official sales numbers for Bloodlines 2 haven't been made public, the PS5 RPG managed to score just a 63 on Metacritic last month. In our PS5 review, we called it "disastrously paced" and a "technical mess" before landing on a 4/10 rating.

The comments from CEO Frederik Wester follow on from claims made by creative director Dan Pinchbeck that Bloodlines 2 was essentially doomed from the moment it landed at The Chinese Room's feet.

While the game was greenlit a decade ago, it's been passed around multiple developers and was handed to the Everybody's Gone to the Rapture studio in September 2023.

"We used to sit there and go and have these planning sessions of, ‘how do we get [the producers] to not call it Bloodlines 2," Pinchbeck questioned. "That feels like the most important thing we do here is to come at this and say this isn’t Bloodlines 2. You can’t make Bloodlines 2. There’s not enough time. There’s not enough money’."

In full, Wester of Paradox Interactive said:

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.

[source gamesindustry.biz]