Vampire Survivors creator Luca Galante, who's now also the slightly overwhelmed head of publishing arm Poncle Presents, made the screen-obliterating roguelike for himself first and foremost. He champions short games and he's a roguelike enthusiast, so he believed in the game's vision, but before it racked up millions of sales, he doubted anyone would play it for very long.
Speaking with GamesRadar+, Galante briefly touches on the idea of a "price to gameplay ratio that feels fair." This is partly why Poncle Presents' first two games, Kill the Brickman (which just got a big "Secret Levels" update) and Berserk or Die, are affordable and compact experiences. It was also a key focus for Vampire Survivors back when Galante was just a solo operator.
There's no hard equation for 'fun per dollar,' but Galante says he tries to use the "movie ticket comparison." He reckons that "if I pay a game as much as I would [spend on] a movie ticket, and I get even just an afternoon of entertainment out of a game, I'm usually happy with it."
"That was the original plan for Vampire Survivors," he continues. "I wasn't expecting anyone to play the game for more than two hours. Despite, in hindsight, I'd been playing that game myself for I don't know how many thousands of hours. But by now, I think that on Steam alone, I probably have 3,000 hours, and those are 3,000 hours of playing and play testing without counting how much time actually spent in development so far. So it is very difficult to understand what that ratio should be."
The obvious irony is that Vampire Survivors is a supremely compelling game that can easily devour hours and hours, day after day, even without all its excellent DLCs added on top. It's cathartic in a lizard brain kind of way, and the progression curve – with upgrades, new characters, and secret unlocks – gives every run a shot of dopamine.
There's a reason we have so many Survivors-likes nowadays, and why many of Vampire Survivors' top user reviews on Steam come from people with upwards of 60, 90, or 120 hours played. The highest I've seen is 559 hours, from a user who writes: "Just 30 minutes a game they said, you can quit whenever you want they said."
Galante knows that many gamers tend to want more out of games "than just an afternoon," even if he himself loves picking up and blasting through small games. Price to gameplay is always just a "gut feeling" about a game rather than a requirement or some hourly quota.
Selling a game for cheap can have a huge effect on its audience, too, especially when it comes to reaching players in regions where games may be less affordable. "There is definitely an idea to try and keep a low price point to make the game accessible to as many people as possible," Galante affirms. "And it is something that is core to Vampire Survivors.
"A lot of the first adopters of the game were people from countries where games are usually very expensive. Where being able to spend, at that time, just $3 for a game like Vampire Survivors, that can give you hours and hours of entertainment, was really appreciated by people who would struggle to actually afford anything above $3. So I'm not sure it has become an ambition, but it has become something that I try to do, which is to serve a market that usually doesn't have the opportunity to play expensive games."
