The saga of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 is coming to a close. After a decade of development, a midpoint studio switch and some last-minute drama surrounding launch DLC, it all culminated in disappointment.
"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," said Paradox CEO Fredrik Wester. "A month after release we can sadly see that sales do not match our projections."
A good-but-not-great game with a middling Metacritic score, saddled with years of expectations and plenty of development drama, Bloodlines 2's fate looked pretty clear the moment it finally arrived.
Paradox announced a write-down of 355 million SEK/$37 million/£28 million (cheers IGN) of capitalised development costs, reflecting that the development costs won't generate the profits the publisher previously anticipated. This is based on an updated sales forecast made a month after Bloodlines 2's launch.
Wester places the blame firmly on Paradox's shoulders. "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."
This almost exactly echoes what his deputy CEO Mattias Lilja told me a year ago, when we had a candid conversation about the company's fall from grace.
"It is not in our strategic direction to make this kind of game," Lilja said. "So if Bloodlines 2, God willing, is successful, Bloodlines 3 [will be] done by someone else, on the licence from us. I would say it's the sort of strategic way this would work. So it's still an outlier from what we're supposed to do, we don't know that stuff, so we should probably let other people do it."
Wester added that the game's sales performance won't have any bearing on updates or the planned DLC expansions. "Our post-release plan remains firm; we will deliver updates and the promised expansions to the game in the coming year."
Bloodlines might just be cursed. While the first game is fondly remembered and continues to be celebrated, it launched in such a terrible state and did so badly that it effectively killed RPG developer Troika Games.
But clearly Paradox has made some big blunders here. The publisher has a very inconsistent track record, and has historically had particular difficulty when it goes beyond the sims and strategy games it's best known for. Hence Wester's comments on focusing capital "to our core segments".
Lilja said the same thing a year ago: "We have solved this problem before, and then we sort of forgot. But I think essentially the solution is what we did back then. We refocused on the core. We stopped talking about stuff before it was ready to be talked about."
It's also what Wester said when he returned as Paradox's CEO in 2021, after stepping down for a few years. And he said it a few times before that, too. It's a classic Paradox move at this point: it takes risks on games outside its wheelhouse, the risks don't pay off, Paradox does a mea culpa and promises to focus on strategy games.
But it's not had much luck with its core interests, either. Empire of Sin, Lamplighters League, Star Trek: Infinite, Millennia and Cities: Skylines 2 are all games that fit perfectly with Paradox, in genres where it has experience.
Lamplighters League was Harebrained Schemes' follow-up to the excellent BattleTech, and the first Cities: Skylines was an astronomical success that filled Paradox's coffers. Paradox and Harebrained Schemes ended their relationship in 2023, while Colossal Order just announced they were breaking up this month.
So while Europa Universalis 5 (which we awarded a score of 87%) has enjoyed a decent launch, Paradox definitely isn't out of trouble yet.
