Vampire Survivors developer Poncle says it’s working on over 15 games and opening new studios, following the big success of the roguelike shoot ‘em up.
Since its release in 2022, Vampire Survivors has surpassed 27 million players, according to Poncle. It also won Best Game at the 2023 BAFTA Games Awards.
This week, the UK-based studio released a deck-builder spin-off, Vampire Crawlers, but according to chief strategy officer Matteo Sapio, there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes.
Speaking to The Game Business, Sapio said Poncle was reinvesting Vampire Survivor’s success into three types of games: spin-offs like Crawlers, original IP titles, and new ‘Survivors’ games based on known IP, like Warhammer 40k.
To help achieve this, it’s expanding with studios in Japan and Italy, which Poncle says will help it collaborate with local companies. However, the company has paused its publishing business, which last year put out third-party games Kill The Brickman and Berserk or Die.
“Vampire Survivors came from a solo developer,” Sapio said. “It was Luca Galanta, who made a game for him and his friends. Vampire Survivors exploded, and in two or three months, it sold more than one million copies.
“Luca’s yachts are video games. So instead of buying a yacht, he made the Emerald Beyond DLC [for Vampire Survivors] with Square Enix, which we released for free. Things grew organically from there.”
Sapio said it will continue to release new ‘Survivors’ games based on other IP in the future, some developed by Poncle, and others – such as the upcoming Warhammer Survivors – built in collaboration with other studios.
“A lot of people came to us and said: ‘Let’s do a collaboration with Survivors’,” he explained. “Survivors seems very simple, with simple graphics. But it’s actually quite complicated.
“If we have knowledge of the IP, we will [make the game] ourselves. But a lot of times we don’t. If you have an IP, for example Warhammer 40k, which has decades of story and lore, we don’t want to risk disappointing the fans.
“So, we made an engine called the Vampire Survivor Engine, which is a kind-of template with all the Vampire Survivor juice inside, and we then we’re giving it to people that we consider the IP guardians.”
The CSO said that by opening smaller studios, Poncle hopes to maintain its indie spirit and be able to take more risks than it otherwise could.
“Our idea is to have little teams of people – five, 10, 15 – working on different projects,” he said. “The structure will be, we will have a designer, a bunch of producers, and this little team that’s agile and flexible. That is how we think we will maintain this spirit. Because what is the indie spirit? It is mainly freedom and taking risk with ideas.
“We don’t want to be AAA or AA. We’re efficient with costs. We don’t take useless risks. We invest in people. So, with 15 projects, one can fail, one can go good, and you balance that.”
