Poncle tillkännagav ambitiösa planer när Vampire Survivors passerade 27 miljoner spelare

Back in 2022, Poncle released a low-budget roguelike shoot-’em-up titled Vampire Survivors, which was fully developed and published by one person, Luca Galante. Almost four years later, the game turned out to be an incredible success for the studio, propelling it to unprecedented heights.

To mark the release of the game’s spin-off, Vampire Crawlers, this week, Poncle’s chief strategy officer, Matteo Sapio, recently spoke with The Game Business, where he revealed that since its release back in 2022, Vampire Survivors has surpassed 27 million players across all platforms. He also announced that the studio is expanding and opening new departments in Italy and Japan as they focus on developing more titles in three directions—making more spin-offs to Vampire Survivors, original IP titles, and new “Survivors” games based on other franchises—like they did with Warhammer 40K. You can check out more words from Matteo Sapio below:

“Vampire Survivors came from a solo developer. It was Luca Galanta, who made a game for him and his friends. Vampire Survivors exploded, and in two or three months, it sold more than one million copies.

Luca’s yachts are video games. So instead of buying a yacht, he made the Emerald Beyond DLC with Square Enix, which we released for free. Things grew organically from there. A lot of people came to us and said: ‘Let’s do a collaboration with Survivors’,” he explained. “Survivors seems very simple, with simple graphics. But it’s actually quite complicated. If we have knowledge of the IP, we will ourselves. But a lot of times we don’t. If you have an IP, for example Warhammer 40k, which has decades of story and lore, we don’t want to risk disappointing the fans.

So, we made an engine called the Vampire Survivor Engine, which is a kind-of template with all the Vampire Survivor juice inside, and we then we’re giving it to people that we consider the IP guardians.

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. That is how we think we will maintain this spirit. Because what is the indie spirit? It is mainly freedom and taking risk with ideas. 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.”

Since its initial release to PC in 2022, Vampire Survivors also got released on Xbox platforms (Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S), mobile (iOS, Android), Nintendo Switch, and both PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.

The latest spin-off to the game, Vampire Crawlers, is available now on PC, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch, with release on iOS and Android planned later in 2026.