‘What a publisher should do is, first of all, make genuine games’: Vampire Survivors creator says he started his own publisher because too few ‘try and let the developer realize their vision’
By Lincoln Carpenter
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Vampire Survivors
‘What a publisher should do is, first of all, make genuine games’: Vampire Survivors creator says he started his own publisher because too few ‘try and let the developer realize their vision’
Lincoln Carpenter
15 September 2025
The progenitor of the Survivors-like genre says he “may be a bit idealistic.”
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(Image credit: poncle)
In 2021, game developer Luca Galante released Vampire Survivors as a diversion from his soul-hollowing day job of working on a mobile gambling game, inadvertently birthing a nascent genre propelled by the force of silly Italian names and millions upon millions of dead bats. In a recent interview with our colleagues at GamesRadar, Galante said the years that followed his unforeseeable success have left him with a blunt assessment of the games industry:
“I see a lot of publishers I don’t like,” Galante said.
(Image credit: poncle)
Today, Vampire Survivors studio Poncle now boasts over 25 staff members and—as of last November—has started its own publishing division, Poncle Presents. Galante told GamesRadar that he wants to offer an alternative to “publishers that try to exploit the platforms just to make money.”
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“My point of view for what a publisher should do is, first of all, make genuine games, genuine products, something that has some real value, and then understand that not everything can be a breakout hit,” Galante said. Unfortunately, he said he sees too many publishers “put out games that are incomplete or in early access that actually never get completed, games that are put out there and left to die” because they didn’t immediately attract landmark success.
“For me, it’s very important that we keep supporting games post-launch, regardless of how the game would go, because once you put the game out there, you have an audience,” Galante said. “And as big or small as it is, that audience deserves to be treated fairly.”
(Image credit: Poncle)
Unsurprisingly, Galante said his natural inclination is towards small games from small teams with small pricetags, but a high “price to gameplay ratio”—which explains how Poncle gravitated to publishing Doonutsaur’s Kill the Brickman and Nao Games’ Berserk or Die.
But as Poncle pursues publishing partnerships with other developers, Galante said his responsibility is to “try and let the developer realize their vision by enriching their vision, and not by trying to force a developer’s vision in a direction so that the game can make more money.”
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Galante did admit that his idea of the publisher-developer relationship “may be a bit idealistic,” but he said that he sees Poncle’s publishing efforts as a way to use the success of Vampire Survivors to lift up its indie fellows.
“We got very lucky with Vampire Survivors. The game has been so successful that—we definitely made some mistakes when it comes to putting the game out there, but we learned a lot and wanted to try to sort of share what we learned with other indies,” Galante said. “It was a way to try and give something back to the indie community, share the luck.”
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Lincoln Carpenter
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Lincoln has been writing about games for 11 years—unless you include the essays about procedural storytelling in Dwarf Fortress he convinced his college professors to accept. Leveraging the brainworms from a youth spent in World of Warcraft to write for sites like Waypoint, Polygon, and Fanbyte, Lincoln spent three years freelancing for PC Gamer before joining on as a full-time News Writer in 2024, bringing an expertise in Caves of Qud bird diplomacy, getting sons killed in Crusader Kings, and hitting dinosaurs with hammers in Monster Hunter.
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Space Marine 2 publisher says even he ‘didn’t believe that we could hit 7 million unique players,’ but it’s proof that players are hungry for sicko games: ‘When the execution is right, it ends up resonating with many more people’
How Mycopunk’s devs turned a school project with zero funding into a ‘Very Positive’ Steam launch: ‘We wanted to make our own dream version of Deep Rock or Helldivers’
In 15 years of interviewing AAA game developers, I think this is the first time one’s straight up told me ‘Many people make games for money, but we make money for games’
John Romero says indies are the future of game development: ‘These people are the ones that make triple-A studios go, ‘Wait a minute, we need to start doing this”
Larian publishing chief says mainstream game industry has a ‘perverse attachment’ to indie studios, because indies still know how to follow their gut
Peak developers react to selling 1M copies after suffering ‘a lot of burnout’ from making bigger games: ‘The realization that smaller projects like this can work has set our studio in a new direction’
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