Vampire Survivors studio Poncle was initially only one designer, Luca Galante, throwing the whole lot he had at his dream roguelike. On the again of the sport’s meteoric success, which has spawned an entire wave of Survivors-likes, it is grow to be a group that now consists of publishing arm Poncle Presents. Like the Among Us-backed Outersloth and Palworld-funded Pocketpair Publishing, Galante says he needed to leverage his mega-hit as a option to “give back” to the trade and assist extra indie video games get made.
In an interview with GamesRadar+, Galante, who remains to be getting used to all of the enterprise fuss that comes with a bigger group and publishing duties, displays on the position and duty of a sport writer immediately.
“I see a lot of publishers I don’t like,” he begins, “and I think that’s my way to define what a good publisher should be, probably. I see a lot of publishers that try to exploit the platforms just to make money, basically, because the video game industry is very obviously an industry that makes a lot of money. There is a lot of money to make. I see that these publishers will try and just exploit platforms for money. Put out games that are incomplete or in early access that actually never get completed, games that are put out there and left to die, basically. Does not make money, left in a broken state, and so on.
“So my point of view for what a publisher should do is, first of all, make genuine games, genuine products, something that has some real value, and then understand that not everything can be a breakout hit. For me, it’s very important that we keep supporting games post-launch, regardless of how the game would go, just because once you put the game out there, you have an audience, and as big or small as it is that audience deserves to be treated fairly. So post-launch support is definitely a big thing from my point of view that publishers should be able to offer.”
So far, Poncle Presents has published developer Doonutsaur’s Kill the Brickman and developer Nao Games’ Berserk or Die – respectively, a $5 roguelike brick breaker, and a $4 2D motion sport with (non-compulsory) keyboard-smashing controls. Both had been obtained moderately nicely on Steam, however neither are within the “breakout hit” territory of Vampire Survivors, and that is simply tremendous.
Galante says he loves low cost and compact video games, and Poncle needs to give attention to very small groups, so his intestine usually leads him towards that type of loosely outlined “price to gameplay ratio,” even when the corporate is open to various scopes because it scouts video games. His precedence is to search out builders “that are very transparent in what they do, they want to talk with their community, and they have a real, genuine passion for making games.”
No matter the scope or success of a sport, actual or projected, Galante says it is key for a writer “to try and let the developer realize their vision by enriching their vision in a way, and not by trying to force a developer’s vision in a direction so that the game can make more money.”
“Talking about stuff like microtransactions and whatnot, they want their seasonal stuff,” he says of writer railroading. “So, again, I may be a bit idealistic, but I definitely see the publishing business more from the point of view of making games, making the developers and the players happy, rather than just a business.
Galante started to consider publishing a few months after Vampire Survivors became successful, and as he added people to Poncle to help support the game, he began to ponder it more seriously.
As it happens, the folks at Poncle have actually spoken to Outersloth and Pocketpair “particularly as a result of we had the same thought about making an attempt to fund different indies” even if they “work on very completely different scales.” (I spoke to Pocketpair comms director and publishing manager John Buckley earlier this year, and he said the company was getting pitches “minutes after Palworld launched” even from “some actually large names.”)
“Basically, we bought very fortunate with Vampire Survivors,” Galante says. “The sport has been so profitable that – we undoubtedly made some errors with regards to placing the sport on the market, however we realized loads, and needed to attempt to form of share what we realized with different indies. It was a option to try to give one thing again to the indie group, share the luck.”
Before selling millions of copies, Vampire Survivors creator says he’d “given up on the thought of success,” and he is not concerned with making one thing simply to achieve success.