Vampire Survivors dev is working on over 15 ‘projects,’ though that includes DLC and updates

Vampire Survivors continues to be a huge deal, and publisher poncle has grown massively since its release in 2022. In an interview with The Game Business, the studio’s chief strategy officer Matteo Sapio talked about the smash hit that now has over 27 million players—and what it’s planning to do with all that dough.

“Vampire Survivors exploded, and in two or three months, it sold more than one million copies,” Sapio said. “[Solo developer Luca Galante]’s yachts are video games. So instead of buying a yacht, he made the Emerald Beyond DLC [for Vampire Survivors] with Square Enix, which we released for free. Things grew organically from there.”

We’ve seen some of that growth pay off already in the form of Vampire Crawlers, the deckbuilding dungeon crawler spinoff, but more is on the way. “Our idea is to have little teams of people—five, 10, 15—working on different projects. The structure will be, we will have a designer, a bunch of producers, and this little team that’s agile and flexible,” Sapio said, adding that the goal is to maintain an indie ethos on a bigger scale.

“We don’t want to be AAA or AA. We’re efficient with costs. We don’t take useless risks. We invest in people. So, with 15 projects, one can fail, one can go good, and you balance that.” In this same talk, Sapio mentioned that the company is opening new studios in Italy and Japan and has plans to dole out its Survivors engine for even more licensed partnerships like Warhammer Survivors. While it’s being developed by a different team and borrows a tabletop setting for its aesthetics, it’s nonetheless “part of the official Survivors lineage.”

Sapio hopes poncle just keeps on growing from there. When asked where he sees the company in five years, he said he’d like to see “40 projects in parallel development at all times everywhere in the world,” adding to the notion that he’d rather see more small games rather than one monolithic game.

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