Vampire Survivors’ success led to many clones of the Vampire Survivors character for mobile devices.
Vampire Survivors’ developers shared their experiences with the mobile gaming market, in a Steam post.
Luca Galante and his team were searching for a business partner in order to develop the mobile version of Vampire Survivors’ Steam chart entry. This was shortly after Vampire Survivors had dominated the Steam charts. However, “nobody I spoke with was on board with the monetization I had in mind for the platform: non-predatory.”
Mobile games are dominated by free-to play, aggressive in-game monetization like microtransactions strongly pushed or bombardment of in-app ads. Galante, who has recently stated that he’s not even a fan of selling DLC to players, was not ready to subject fans of his game to such a treatment.
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Unfortunately, “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.” Lax IP protection is another huge challenge in the world of mobile games, with clones of popular titles and concepts very quickly flooding the market in a sort of gold rush to secure a piece of the cake.
Galante continues: “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.” This rushed process forced the team to make some compromises, so some features are still missing. Despite all this, Vampire Survivors’ mobile version has strong ratings in both iOS and Android stores, but is light on monetization.
One of the challenges facing the team is a lack of mobile devices to recreate bugs on, so if you have some old phone laying around you might just have found a buyer – you might spare the devs from the obligation of “scouting even the dodgiest possible places” for the right hardware.
Vampire Survivors will be bringing more content to the fans in 2023. It could even include vampires.
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