Vampire Survivors Dev Released Mobile Port Itself to Fight Copycats
Vampire Survivors developer Poncle was forced to release his mobile game “ASAP” after several exact copies started appearing in the market.
As reported by GI.biz, Poncle had originally tried to bring Vampire Survivors to mobile devices in the wake of its successful launch in 2022 on PC and Xbox, but struggled to find a partner who shared his monetization views.
“Soon after the initial success of VS, I started looking for a business partner to work on a mobile version of the game,” reads a new blog on the game’s Steam page. “Unfortunately, no one I spoke to was on board with the monetization I had in mind for the platform: not predatory.”
Vampire Survivor Screens
However, in the wake of these conversations, unlicensed versions of the game began to appear in mobile stores. “Months passed and a large number of actual clones — not ‘games like Vampire Survivors’, but actual one-for-one copies with stolen code, assets, data, progression — started popping up everywhere,” the post continued.
“This forced our hand to release the mobile game as soon as possible and put a lot of stress on the development team that wasn’t even supposed to worry about mobile in the first place.”
The mobile version of Vampire Survivors released on Android and IOS in early December 2022. However, the need to release the game quickly meant that some features – including cloud servers and save transfers – were left out of the initial release.
According to the Steam post, Poncle is still looking to implement these features as they work on multiple bug fixes, but in the absence of a support engineer, they may take “longer than expected” to appear. .
As it stands, the mobile version of Vampire Survivors is completely free to play, with players having the ability to watch optional ads at the end of a program in order to earn more gold or revive their character.
On December 15, Poncle released the first piece of DLC for Vampire Survivors, Legacy of the Moonspell, on PC and Xbox. In the new blog post, the developer admits it’s still figuring out how to bring the DLC to mobile.
“The problems we’re facing are the same ones mentioned above: how to make it fair but also accessible to players who are only in free games. We’ll figure something out and release the DLC as soon as possible.”
Moving forward, Poncle has announced that it intends to continue updating Vampire Survivors and has pledged, in terms of core gameplay mechanics, that “no key feature will ever be protected by a paywall.” The developers also said that more DLC content packs will be released in the future that will bring more characters, weapons and stages to the game.
In our review, IGN gave Vampire Survivors a 7/10, stating that “It may seem extremely basic, but if you give Vampire Survivors’ clever stick-shooting idea a chance to sink its teeth into you, you might don’t let him go for a while.”
Anthony is a freelance contributor covering science and video game news for IGN. He has over eight years of experience covering groundbreaking developments in multiple scientific fields and has absolutely no time for your shenanigans. Follow him on Twitter @BeardConGamer
