Vampire Survivors developer Poncle was pressured to launch its sport on cellular “ASAP” after a number of actual copies started showing in the marketplace.
As reported by GI.biz, Poncle had initially tried to convey Vampire Survivors to cellular gadgets within the wake of its profitable 2022 launch on PC and Xbox, however struggled to discover a companion that shared its views on monetization.
“Quickly after the preliminary success of VS, I began to search for a enterprise companion to work on a cellular model of the sport,” reads a brand new weblog on the sport’s Steam web page. “Sadly, no one I spoke with was on board with the monetization I had in thoughts for the platform: non-predatory.”
Within the wake of those conversations, nevertheless, unlicensed variations of the sport began showing on cellular shops. “Months handed by and a lot of precise clones – not “video games like Vampire Survivors”, however precise one to 1 copies with stolen code, property, information, development – began to look in all places,” the publish continued.
“This pressured our hand to launch the cellular sport ASAP, and put loads of stress on the dev workforce that wasn’t even supposed to fret about cellular within the first place.”
The cellular model of Vampire Survivors launched on Android and IOS in early December 2022. Nonetheless, the necessity to launch the sport shortly led to some options – together with cloud servers and save transfers – being disregarded of the preliminary launch.
In line with the Steam publish, Poncle continues to be seeking to implement these options as they work on quite a few bug fixes, however within the absence of a backend engineer, they might take “longer than anticipated” to look.
Because it stands the cellular model of Vampire Survivors is totally free to play, with avid gamers being able to view optionally available adverts on the finish of a run in an effort to earn extra gold or revive their character.
On December 15, Poncle launched the primary piece of DLC for Vampire Survivors, Legacy of the Moonspell, on PC and Xbox. Within the new weblog publish the developer admits that it is nonetheless determining methods to convey the DLC to cellular.
“The issues we’re dealing with are the identical talked about above: how will we make it honest, but additionally accessible to gamers who’re solely into free video games. We’ll determine one thing out and publish the DLC as quickly as potential.”
Shifting ahead, Poncle has introduced that it intends to proceed updating Vampire Survivors, and has pledged, by way of principal sport mechanics, that “no key-feature will ever be gatekept by a paywall”. The builders additionally mentioned that extra DLC content material packs will likely be launched sooner or later that may convey extra characters, weapons, and levels to the sport.
In our evaluate, IGN awarded Vampire Survivors a 7/10, stating that “It might look extraordinarily fundamental, however in case you give Vampire Survivors’ intelligent one-stick shooter thought an opportunity to sink its tooth into you it won’t let go for some time”.
Anthony is a contract contributor protecting science and video gaming information for IGN. He has over eight years expertise of protecting breaking developments in a number of scientific fields and completely no time to your shenanigans. Comply with him on Twitter @BeardConGamer
