Vampire Survivors developer, Poncle, has admitted that the studio never intended to port the successful roguelike game to mobile in-house. The small team opted to do the work themselves after being unable to find any mobile developer interested in adopting a ‘non-predatory’ monetization model.
In a yearly wrap-up on Steam, leader developer Luca Galante and the Poncle team discussed the ups and downs of their year. One of the main points was the mobile release of Vampire Survivors. We’ve covered the Vampire Survivors Android port, and enjoyed it immensely. As it turns out though, the small studio had never planned to create the mobile port themselves.
In-House Development Was Plan B
The original plan had been to find a mobile-focused developer to do most of the heavy lifting for the Android and iOS versions of the game. This didn’t work out, all due to monetization.
Poncle has committed to trying to monetize in the least intrusive way possible. Playing the Android version makes that pretty clear. Ads are present, but pretty sparse, and there’s no bombardment of microtransactions to try and squeeze a bit of money out of you.
Apparently, Poncle had talks with several mobile developers but none of them showed interest in adopting the philosophy that Poncle wanted for its port. The studio had to turn them all down.
Attack Of The Clones
Unfortunately for Poncle, while all this was happening, Vampire Survivors clones were hitting app stores. The post details how clones with clearly stolen code and assets were being marketed, making creating an official port something they had to do sooner, rather than later.
The studio mentions this to explain why a few features of the port are less polished than it would like. The team developed the port in-house and rushed to finish it.
While this wasn’t easy, it seems like Poncle regrets nothing about its choices, and appears committed to trying to keep monetization fair going forward. They’re not certain what form this will take when the DLC, Legacy Of Moonspell, hits mobile platforms, but we have high hopes that it will continue to make ethical choices.
