Vampire Survivors developer opens publishing arm and tells F2P and Web3 mobile games to f*** off

Poncle, the developer of Vampire Survivors, is moving away from creating videogames that can be described as pure sugar in digital format. It's getting Businessy and has announced that a new publishing department will be opened. This is presumably to help devs eat up hours, days, or months of our time playing the most absurdly moreish videogames ever made.

According to GI.biz, Poncle's Team was speaking at Game Republic’s Pitching to investors and Publishers event on Wednesday in Liverpool when it announced their big plans to fund other people's dream of becoming a game developer. It said that it would not be a traditional publisher, which is believable since the company's recent patch notes were a series of scrawls in various font sizes of "Bug fixes" and "Improvements".

Poncle is right to say that every capitalist wants their endeavors to sound like they are coming from a place where love is present. But I am inclined to believe him on this. It claims to want to act as a piggybank to help others "make games" and offers things like funding, localisation, quality assurance, and other stuff that you would expect from a publisher. "We want to do everything!" The team replied, "But we are very smol!"

It doesn't actually want to sign for everything. Poncle has standards to maintain, you know. That's why it has a list "insta-nos", or things that it won't support, no matter what. What's in it? AI and Web3 nonsense. Free-to-play mobile gaming. And anything "Survivor-like."

The first two are obvious: AI and Web3 as fields (that's crypto-stuff and NFTs and whatever else) aren't very popular with developers or players. They are viewed as tech-broey, grabbing incursions in our pure and holy gaming area. Mobile games that are free-to-play have a similar feel. There are some genuinely good games, but the proliferation of asset-flipping and minimum-effort cash-grabs has cast a shadow over the entire scene.

But I'm curious about how strict the "Survivor-like policy" is. Since the original Vampire Survivors hit it big, Vampire Survivors games have become a genre in their own right. Some of them are fantastic. Poncle may not want to fund a direct competitor of its own game, but I'm curious about how strict this policy is. I've contacted the studio to ask about this, and will update this article if I receive a response.