Vampire Survivors Dev Talks Clones And Predatory Monetization – Kotaku
Image: poncle
When Steam best seller Vampire Survivors made the surprise jump to mobile last month, it wasn’t just as compulsively playable as its PC and console counterparts, it was also free. And unobtrusively so. In a sea of aggressively monetized and sometimes downright exploitative smartphone games, it stood out all the more. Developer Poncle now explains that the crappy app marketplace is the reason Vampire Survivors’ free port exists in the first place.
Vampire Survivors was itself inspired by a 2021 Android game called Magic Survival, but its explosion in popularity on Steam early last year led to its own clones on the App and Google Play stores as players searched for a game that didn’t yet exist on the platforms. “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,” Poncle recently wrote in an end of 2022 update on the game’s Steam page (via PC Gamer). “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 developer said they tried to look for a business partner to work with them on a mobile version of the game, but nobody they spoke to was on board with “non-predatory” monetization. The biggest App and Google Play store games are all free, but most still collect their pound of flesh one way or another. Many gate progression unless you wait a certain period of time or pay, while others monetize gameplay benefits aimed at milking repeat customers lovingly referred to as “whales.” A few operate like thinly veiled slot machines. Vampire Survivors doesn’t use any of that. Instead it relies on completely optional ads.
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