The mobile version of Vampire Survivors was released a month ago completely free of charge (opens in new tab), and in Steam's 2022 summary message (opens in new tab), developer Poncle explained why they chose to distribute it for free and why some features of the mobile version and the " Legacy of the Moonspell" (opens in new tab) DLC may take longer than expected to deliver.

Poncle claims that it had no intention of making a mobile version of Vampire Survivors in-house, but after spending "several months" looking for a mobile development company, it could not find one that would accept "non-predatory" monetization. Ultimately, the studio was forced to relent by the emergence of a large number of clones (opens in new tab), many of which were "actual 1:1 copies with code, assets, data, and progression stolen."

Thus, Poncle took on the task of bringing the real mobile version of "Vampire Survivors" to the world as quickly as possible. However, Poncle had no intention of working on mobile development at all, so there are still some features missing or unpolished, mainly cloud saves and save transfers. Poncle said, "We don't have a back-end/full-stack engineer yet, so this may take longer than expected."

Poncle also explained why they chose to make Vampire Survivors free on mobile devices.

"If you're like me, if you wanted to play Vampire Survivors on mobile, you would have been more than happy to pay a couple bucks and be done with it. But that's not how the mobile market works. By making Vampire Survivors a paid app, many new players will not even get to try the game.

"This led us to the free-for-real approach. There, monetization is minimal and designed to never interrupt the game. It's a complete game that can be played offline, in landscape or portrait, by touch or by gamepad"

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That is a valid point. Most mobile games are free to play, have relatively aggressive monetization schemes, and depend on "whales" (a small portion of the player base that spends a lot of money) to survive. Even Nintendo (open in new tab) is not trying to charge for mobile games.

At the same time, Poncle has not offered any insight into how they define "non-predatory" monetization, how many developers they have actually talked to, or what conditions they have offered to accept a port of "Vampire Survivors" to charge $0 None.

Regardless of the specifics, the completely free approach leaves the studio uncertain about how it will handle future updates and the release of the Moonspell DLC." The problems we face are the same as those described above." "How can we be fair and still allow access to players who are only interested in the free games?" Ponkle wrote." We will resolve this as soon as possible and release the DLC!"

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As for fixing bugs on mobile, Poncle said the process is slow because they do not have access to the devices needed to reproduce "niche" issues. The studio wrote: "We are working on it and scouting even the sleaziest places possible to find the devices we need."

The mobile version of "Vampire Survivors" is available on the App Store (opens in new tab) and Google Play (opens in new tab). We have contacted Ponkle for more information on the development of the mobile game and will update if we hear back.