Vampire Survivors Dev Released Mobile Port Itself to Fight Copycats
Vampire Survivors developer Poncle was forced to release its game on mobile “ASAP” after several exact copies began appearing on the market.
As reported by GI.biz, Poncle had initially attempted to bring Vampire Survivors to mobile devices in the wake of its successful 2022 launch onPC and Xbox, but struggled to find a partner that shared its views on monetization.
“Soon after the initial success of VS, I started to look for a business partner to work on a mobile version of the game,” reads a new blog on the game’s Steam page. “Unfortunately, nobody I spoke with was on board with the monetization I had in mind for the platform: non-predatory.”
In the wake of these conversations, however, unlicensed versions of the game started appearing on mobile stores. “Months passed by and a large number of actual clones - not "games like Vampire Survivors", but actual one to one copies with stolen code, assets, data, progression - started to appear everywhere,” the post continued.
“This forced our hand to release the mobile game ASAP, and put a lot of stress on the dev 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 led to some features - including cloud servers and save transfers - being left out of the initial release.
According to the Steam post, Poncle is still looking to implement these features as they work on numerous bug fixes, but in the absence of a backend engineer, they may take “longer than expected” to appear.
As it stands the mobile version of Vampire Survivors is entirely free to play, with gamers having the ability to view optional adverts at the end of a run in
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