Developer gives game away for free because it can't find a 'non-predatory' studio to handle mobile port

If you were keeping up with The Game Awards nominations last year (or just have good taste in general), you’ll probably be familiar with Vampire Survivors.

The oh-so-moreish roguelite was a hidden gem in 2022’s lineup of games - players are tasked with taking on waves of enemies with the goal of surviving for a full 30 minutes. With a brilliant soundtrack and a gorgeous retro vibe, anyone who plays it will easily understand why it got nominated for Best Debut Indie at The Game Awards. It was also one of GAMINGbible’s favourite games of the year, which I’m not saying counts for more, but it’s something, okay?

Take a look at the trailer for Vampire Survivors below.

Anyway, as PC Gamer writes, after its release on PC and Xbox, Vampire Survivors released totally free on mobile, and we now know the reason why. In a post on Steam celebrating their 2022 achievements, indie devs Poncle (founded by Luca Galante) revealed that they’d been unsuccessful in finding a business partner that would handle the game in the way they wanted it to be.

“Soon after the initial success of VS, I started to look for a business partner to work on a mobile version of the game. Unfortunately, nobody I spoke with was on board with the monetisation I had in mind for the platform: non-predatory,” the post reads. “Months passed by and a large number of actual clones - not ‘games like Vampire Survivors’, but actual 1:1 copies with stolen code, assets, data, progression - started to appear everywhere.”

The post explains how this forced the devs to release their game on mobile as soon as they could, which meant that some features weren’t integrated or fully polished when it first came out.

“If you're like me, then if you wanted VS on mobile you'd have been happy to just pay a couple of bucks for it and call it a day; but the mobile market doesn't work like that and by making VS a paid app I'd have cut out completely a lot of new players from even trying the game,” the post continues. “This is why we ended up with a free-for-real approach, where monetisation is minimal and is designed to never interrupt your game, always be optional and in your control through a couple of ‘watch ads’ buttons, and doesn't have any of that [sic] real money sinks that mobile cash grabs are usually designed around. It's just the full game, playable offline, in landscape or portrait, with touch controls or with a gamepad.”

Bug fixes are coming to mobile soon, the devs assured, so players can look forward to an even smoother experience.