Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. 13 games that sunk their dev teams
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This time, the case is pretty tragic. Troika Games has made some good games. In the short time when it was operational (between 1998 and 2005), the studio released three games: Arcanum: The Parable of Machines and Magic, The Temple of Elemental Evil and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. Better yet, this team consisted of the fathers of the first Fallout. So what went wrong?
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, the last game in Troika's catalog, despite technical errors, is today fondly remembered. The recent announcement of the next part, which is supposed to be developed by Troika Games, also aroused a lot of interest. However, this doesn't change the fact that the original fought an uphill struggle. The title, despite the fantastic atmosphere and the successful storyline, was very underdeveloped in technical terms. Worse still, it was released at the same time as Half-Life 2.
As a result, sales results were not as good as they could have been. Years later, the company's founder, Tim Cain, stated that the problem was not the sales figures themselves.
I don't think Troika closed because we were trying to be too original. We closed because we were not getting contract offers for products we wanted to make. […] So then the question is, why didn't we get any offers we liked? Especially since all of our games turned a profit? From the publishers point of view, our previous games had sold to a niche audience, so they were unwilling to fund us to make either a new IP or a large mainstream game based on a licensed IP [...]. In other words, they could spend that money at other developers where their rate of return was much higher.
Tim Cain
The company's latest game, however, lived on, because the fans didn't abandon Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, patching the game even many years after the premiere. It's worth mentioning that Troika Games wanted to work on another game – the third Fallout. Ultimately, however, the rights to this IP went to Bethesda, and you probably know the rest of the story.
