The team behind Vampire Survivors isn't slowing down — they're multiplying. At the London Games Festival, Poncle chief strategy officer Matteo Sapio revealed that the studio now has over 15 projects in active development, a staggering number for a company that only a few years ago was a one-person operation run by founder Luca Galante out of a London flat.
Vampire Survivors has now surpassed 27 million players, and Poncle is pouring that success into an ambitious expansion. Two new studio offices are opening — one in Japan and one in Italy — each designed as lean satellite teams of five to fifteen people working on distinct projects.
Three Pillars of Development
Sapio broke the studio's pipeline into three categories. First, there are direct spin-offs of the Vampire Survivors formula — the most recent being Vampire Crawlers, a deckbuilder that launched last week on Game Pass. Second, Poncle is developing Survivors-style games built around other franchises, including a confirmed Warhammer Survivors title. Third — and perhaps most intriguingly — the studio has two entirely new IPs in development that haven't been revealed yet.
"We think of it like a federation of studios," Sapio explained. "Little teams of people working on different things, staying agile and flexible." It's a model that echoes what Devolver Digital and Annapurna have done on the publishing side, but applied internally at a single developer.
Japan Expansion Driven by IP Ambitions
The Japan office is a particularly telling move. Sapio cited "interest from Japanese companies" and the desire to tap into the country's "unique views and unique creativity." Reading between the lines, it sounds like Poncle is actively pursuing collaborations with Japanese IP holders — a natural progression for a studio that's already shown it can adapt its addictive gameplay loop to different thematic wrappers.
The Italy office, meanwhile, represents a homecoming of sorts for founder Luca Galante, who is Italian. It positions Poncle to recruit from a growing European indie development talent pool while maintaining its London headquarters as the creative nerve center.
Profit Takes a Back Seat
Perhaps the most refreshing detail from Sapio's talk was his blunt assertion that "profit is not a priority" for the studio right now. With Vampire Survivors generating the kind of revenue that 27 million players implies, Poncle has the runway to experiment freely — and they're clearly planning to use every bit of it. For fans of the genre that Poncle essentially invented, 2026 and beyond is looking very busy.
