Poncle, the developer of 2022’s indie hitVampire Survivors, has explained why it ended up working on the mobile version of the game rather than using a third-party studio. After the “gothic horror casual game” originally launched for free on Itch.io in March 2021, it released on PC and Xbox consoles near the end of 2022.Vampire Survivorsproved to be incredibly well received and even won a Golden Joystick Award, resulting in the launch of the mobile version just a couple of months later.
While that might seem to be a rushed turnaround time, Poncle has explained that it released themobile port ofVampire Survivorsquickly to combat the influx of clones. Though seen much less frequently on more standard platforms like PC or console, popular mobile titles being copied and flooding app stores is very common practice and can greatly harm the developers of the original game. And Poncle has stated that many of these duplicate games had taken assets, progression, and even code directly fromVampire Survivors.
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But rather than turn to a studio experienced in developing mobile titles, Poncle ended up having to create the small-screen port ofVampire Survivorsitself. In a 2022 wrap-up message on Steam, the company revealed that it had begun looking for a partner to work on the mobile version fairly quickly. However, after months of searching, Poncle could not find a developer that was okay with forgoing themonetization schemes so prevalent in the mobile market. TheVampire Survivorsstudio, on the other hand, was determined to go with something less “predatory.”
As a result,Vampire Survivorshas performed extremely well on mobile, with ratings of 4.8/5 on both Google Play and the App Store at the time of writing. Poncle had feared that adding aggressive monetization would eliminate a huge part of the potential player base. Instead, the developer made sure the game’s moneymaking tactics would never interrupt gameplay and could be controlled by the player via a “Watch Ads” button.
It’s important to keep in mind, therefore, that Poncle started out as a one-man team. And at the time of posting the end-of-year wrap-up message, the developer was still on the hunt for a Full Stack engineer. So some features expected of the game’s mobile version,such as cloud saves and save transfers, are still missing, and there are a noticeable number of bugs. Additionally, Poncle is still uncertain how to distribute theLegacy of the Moonspell DLC forVampire Survivorson mobile. Considering that more paid DLC is planned for the future, an acceptable release model for portable platforms, where many people expect free-to-play games, is of paramount importance.
Vampire Survivorsis currently available on Mobile, PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
