Vampire Survivors developer Poncle decided to port its surprise hit to mobile devices as soon as possible, as hundreds of copycats and literal clones started flooding the marketplaces.
According to a report by GI.biz, developer Poncle had been trying to release the game on mobile devices ever since it achieved its surprise popularity after the game was fully released on PC and Xbox. “Soon after the initial success of VS, I was looking for a business partner to work on a mobile version of the game,” he said in a blog post on the game’s official Steam page. “Unfortunately, no one I spoke to agreed with the monetization I had in mind for the platform: non-predatory.”
As it turned out, after these talks, Vampire Survivors began to appear en masse in mobile stores, and not just similar games (of which there are many now), but true one-to-one copies of the game. These titles were complete clones of Poncle’s own creation and contained, as the developer claims, “stolen code, assets, data, progress…”.
He revealed, “This has forced us to release the mobile game as soon as possible and has put a lot of stress on the development team, who shouldn’t be bothered with the mobile at all.” The game’s release was announced the same day, on which it was released in digital stores and announced on December 8th, 2022 during The Game Awards. It was released simultaneously on Android and iOS, but die-hard fans of the game quickly realized that some features were left out in the new version. Now we know why.
Survival for all! (vampires not guaranteed)
However, it’s not all bad news as this version of Vampire Survivors includes all of the original content that still offers dozens of hours of fun and gameplay. According to the developer, the team is still working on bringing these features (like cloud servers and crossplay between all versions) to mobile while trying to fix every bug they can identify.
Of course, since the game is completely free to play on mobile, the fans are not as hard on the developers as on other occasions. Nevertheless, Poncle tries to make the monetization of the game completely transparent and fair. They are even trying to find a solution on how to offer the latest DLC, Legacy of the Moonspell, for the free version of the game while making it fair and accessible to all.
Source | Steam, GamesIndustry.biz
