When Vampire Survivors was released in 2022, few people could have imagined that this modest bullet-heaven roguelike game from one developer would turn into a scaling machine for an entire studio. Today, the game has more than 27 million players — and poncle is clearly not going to stop.
In an interview with The Game Business, Matteo Sapio, the studio’s director of strategy, explained what the team is currently doing. Spoiler alert: The figure is impressive.
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15 poncle projects in 2026: DLC for Vampire Survivors, Warhammer Survivors and more
According to Sapio, poncle is simultaneously working on more than 15 “projects.” However, this word hides a rather broad concept: it includes full-fledged new games, add-ons for Vampire Survivors, and planned updates. So the universe is not expanding in 15 directions at once — but the studio’s activity is really serious.
The already well—known result of this work is Vampire Crawlers, a spin-off in the deckbuilder dungeon crawler genre, which was released earlier this year. But this is just the beginning.
Small teams, large scale: how development works in the studio after the Vampire Survivors hit
Poncle’s philosophy sounds unusual for a successful studio: no AAA path. Sapio describes the model as “small teams of 5-15 people, each working on their own project.” Flexible, economical, and without inflated budgets.
“One project may not take off, another will fire, and everything will be balanced,” he explains the logic. This is more of a portfolio approach than betting on one big hit.
At the same time, the studio opens new offices in Italy and Japan. And the Survivors engine is already licensed: Warhammer Survivors, developed by a third-party team, is officially part of the “Survivors line” and uses the same database.
Studio founder Luca Galante, according to Sapio, could buy a yacht after selling a million copies in a couple of months. Instead, he invested in the free DLC Emerald Beyond in collaboration with Square Enix. This approach, apparently, sets the tone for the entire studio.
In five years, Sapio wants to see poncle with 40 parallel projects around the world. Not one monolithic AAA game, but dozens of living, breathing indie projects. Time will tell if it will work. But so far, the guys have a convincing track record.
