Vampire Survivors developer Poncle is branching out from making videogames that are pure sugar in digital form. It’s getting businessy, and has announced that it’s opening a new publishing division, presumably to help other devs consume hours, days, months of our time with the most absurdly moreish games ever made.
According to GI.biz, Poncle’s team was speaking at Game Republic’s Pitching to Investors and Publishers event in Liverpool on Wednesday when it announced its big plans to bankroll other people’s game dev dreams. Specifically, it said it wasn’t going to be a “traditional publisher,” which is entirely believable for the company whose recent patch notes just consisted of increasingly unhinged scrawls of “Bug fixes and improvements” in different-sized fonts.
Of course, every capitalist on Earth wants to make their endeavours sound like they come from a place of love, but I’m inclined to believe Poncle on this one. It says it wants to act pretty much as a piggy bank to help others “make their games,” and is offering stuff like funding, help with platforms, localisation, QA, and all the other stuff you generally expect from, you know, a publisher. “We want to sign everything!” said the team, “But we’re very smol!”
Except, actually, it doesn’t want to sign everything. There are standards to maintain around here, you know, and that means Poncle has a list of “insta-nos”: stuff it’s not gonna support no matter how much you twist its arm. What’s on it? AI and Web3 nonsense, free-to-play mobile games, and anything “Survivor-like.”
The first two are self-explanatory: AI and Web3 (that means crypto-stuff, NFTs, and what-have-you) as fields aren’t popular with devs or players, and are widely regarded as tech-broey, grasping incursions into our pure and holy gaming space. Free-to-play mobile games have much of the same whiff about them. Sure, there are some that are genuinely good, but a profusion of asset-flips and minimum-effort cash grabs has cast a pall on the whole scene.
But I’m curious how strict that “Survivor-like” policy is. Vampire Survivors-esque games have become a bit of their own genre since the original hit it big, and some of them are great. Perhaps Poncle just doesn’t want a conflict of interest—funding a direct competitor to its own game—but I’m curious how strict that policy is. I’ve reached out to the studio to find out, and I’ll update this piece if I hear back.
