Indie lightning doesn’t usually strike twice — let alone turn into a full-blown global expansion. But that’s exactly what’s happening with the UK-based studio as it’s cooking up 15 projects and overseas studios. Speaking with The Game Business during the London Game Festival, Poncle chief strategy officer Matteo Sapio revealed that Vampire Survivors has now surpassed 27 million players. What started as a scrappy personal project for solo developer Luca Galante has now snowballed into a worldwide sensation with countless imitators.
But rather than cashing in on its success, Poncle is doubling down on more projects. “So instead of buying a yacht, he made the Emerald Beyond DLC with Square Enix, which we released for free,” said Sapio, seemingly poking fun at big-spending rockstar developers like Star Citizen‘s Cloud Imperium Games. “Things grew organically from there.”
The studio revealed that it currently has ‘over 15 games’ in active development — even more in ‘earlier stages’ — split across three categories. Those are Vampire Survivors spin-offs, two completely original IPs, and licensed Survivors-like games based on other franchises. As we already know, one of the latter is Warhammer Survivors, planned to launch sometime this year, with more collaborations to come.
The backbone of all these efforts is a mix of internal tech and global expansion. Although Vampire Survivors might look extremely simple compared to most modern games, Sapio stressed that it’s actually ‘quite complicated’ under the hood. For that reason, Poncle has set up a dedicated engine to help external developers craft their own Survivors-like using other IPs. It’s also prepping new studios in Japan and Italy, while sticking to small, agile team structures.
“We are thinking about it like a federation of studios. Our idea is to have little teams of people – five, 10, 15 – working on different projects. […] We don’t want to be AAA or AA. […] We don’t take useless risks,” explained Sapio. To mitigate that risk, the team also collaborates with other studios like Arcade Paradise developer Nosebleed Interactive for the Vampire Crawlers deck-building spin-off. “So, with 15 projects, one can fail, one can go good, and you balance that.”
Interestingly, despite its rapid growth, Poncle has decided to ‘pause’ Poncle Presents, its third-party publishing label. Sapio explained that the label was meant to give back to the community by supporting ‘weird’ indie games like Berserk or Die. However, he admitted that they weren’t able to give the ‘right support’ to their partners.
“We didn’t do the best for [Berserk or Die]. So, we’ve paused a little bit. At the moment, profit is not a priority. We’re trying to build a community,” said Sapio.
Even so, the Vampire Survivors developers’ ambitions remain sky-high. Sapio joked about a future with ’40 projects in parallel development,’ but they all want Poncle’s core philosophy intact. Experiment freely, accept failure, and keep making games.
