Vampire Suvivors developer Poncle opens publishing arm

Vampire Survivors developer Poncle is launching its own publishing arm.

As reported by GamesIndustry.biz, while speaking at Game Republic’s Pitching to Investors and Publishers event in Liverpool yesterday, the Poncle team claimed that it didn’t simply “want IP” and wouldn’t operate as a “traditional” publisher in the independent games space.

The goal for the publishing arm is, according to Poncle, to help in allowing developers to make the game they want to make.

The publisher will offer funding support, as well as support with first-party platforms, localization, release management, and more. The team is looking for games developed with “sincerity, passion and depth”.

The publisher outlined a group of “insta-no” pitches that it will uniformly reject. These include “Survivor-like” games that stray too close to its own Vampire Survivors. The company also won’t involve itself in games that are AI or Web3-related, or free-to-play mobile titles.

Vampire Survivors was released for PC, Mac, Xbox consoles and mobile in 2022, before hitting Switch in 2023 and PlayStation platforms earlier this Summer.

It was well received by critics, earnings it scores ranging from 86 to 95 on review aggregations site Metacritic.

Vampire Survivors won Action Game of the Year at last year’s DICE Awards, as well as the Best Game and Best Design prizes at the BAFTA Games Awards.

Plans to bring Vampire Survivors to PlayStation consoles were announced alongside Contra-themed DLC for the game, which was released for other platforms in May.