Mafia II Unlikely To Make Any Money For Take-Two, Says Michael Pachter

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Mafia II, the open world sequel to 2002′s sleeper hit, Mafia: The City Of Lost Heaven, is unlikely to lost money for the publisher who bankrolled it, 2K Games and its parent company, Take-Two. The game spent an incredible six years in development, racking up quite a bill for the company. Now, as it’s getting mixed reviews, alleged mediocre sales numbers and a ‘disappointing’ Metacritic score, (in)famous game industry analyst Michael Patcher says that Take-Two is looking to Red Dead Redemption to cover its tracks.

According to Patcher, the Metacritic score of 74 for Mafia 2 was below what Take-Two expected for the game, and the game appears to have quickly dropped off of “best-seller” lists from various major retailers.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Metacritic scores cited by important (well, important as Patcher can be) people in the game industry. Sega’s Alpha Protocol received only a 63 from the score aggregation site, and that was cited directly as Sega president Mike Hayes as a reason as to why Sega won’t be developing a Alpha Protocol sequel.

Although you may think that a score of “50″ is average, for the past 15 years, we’ve seen the video game media live on the “7 to 9″ scale where anything lower than an “80″ is frowned upon.

Back to 2K and Take-Two, their open-world Old West game Red Dead Redemption game has been selling very, very well. The game has been dominating sales and could very well end up being one of the best-selling games of the year. From a Wall Street aspect, Take-Two will be leaning on the better-than-expected sales of RDR to cover their tracks on the worse-than-expected performance of Mafia 2.

Did you play Mafia 2? What did you think? Tell us about it in the comments section.