Paradox Interactive has taken the blame for the poor commercial performance of Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines 2, which arrived in October 2025 after numerous delays to lukewarm reviews from critics.
Speaking this week in a note to financial markets, the publisher has signalled 355 million SEK ($37 million) write-down o capitalised development costs for the vampiric sequel, which was based on an updated sales forecast after having a month to examine the performance of the game.
Rather than place the blame on the developer of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, The Chinese Room, the CEO of Paradox Interactive Fredrik Wester has said the publisher takes full responsibility of the game’s poor performance.
Related Content – Upcoming PS5 Games 2025: The Best PS5 Games Coming Soon
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.
Earlier this week, Dan Pinchbeck, the co-founder of The Chinese Room, said that he originally wanted Paradox to remove the Bloodlines 2 title from the game as he didn’t think it was possible to create a worthy sequel to the original cult classic. Development of the sequel proved tumultuous, as it was originally handed to Hardsuit Labs before they were taken off the project in favour of The Chines Room, with the game seeing multiple delays.
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 launched for PS5, PC, and Xbox Series X/S on October 21, 2025. You can read our full review here.
[Source – Paradox Interactive via IGN]